Book description
Ansel Phoenix makes her living drawing dinosaurs for magazines, books,
and museum displays. One morning, digging with students out in the
field, she unearths the body of colleague and ex-lover Nick Capos.
Shocked and grieved over the murder, Ansel is also distraught on a
professional level. As president of the Pangaea Society, an esteemed
paleontology organization to which the murdered botanist had also
belonged, Ansel must fight to preserve the society's reputation when
unsavory facts about its scientists-dead and alive-are revealed. Not
trusting the Big Toe police who've an axe to grind with her father, she
decides to investigate what Capos had been doing during the last few
months of his life and soon suspects he was working on a secret,
possibly illegal, project worth killing for. Her list of possible
suspects grows by the hour as someone starts stalking her across the
Montana landscape. This master predator will stop at nothing to keep her
from discovering...what? Why is Nick's fossil collection missing and why
had he developed a recent interest in Baltic amber? Ansel must also deal
with the cultural challenges of her own half-Anglo, half-Blackfoot
heritage, with her ranching family, and with the changes threatening
their rural community while using her intuitive fossil-sleuthing skills
to solve more than one Mesozoic mystery. “When on a fossil hunt for
ancient dinosaur bones, one would hardly expect to find a
recently-buried corpse, but that's what palaeoartist Ansel Phoenix and
her class of three students find on their first field trip at the edge
of a Montana pig farm. The find is especially disturbing for Phoenix,
since there is still enough recognizable about the badly-decomposed body
for her to immediately realize the dead man is Nick Capos. Capos, a
palaeobotanist friend of hers had, at one time, been more than a friend.
Lieutenant Reid Dorbrandt, the investigating officer, soon discovers
that an injection of strychnine was the cause of death, and that there
had been mysterious goings-on during the last few months of his life. In
the meantime, Phoenix is especially concerned about clearing up the
mystery, since she is director of an archaeological society which is on
the knife-edge of receiving a grant that will guarantee its continued
existence. The murder is just plain bad publicity and may jeopardize the
society's chances of receiving the grant. MESOZOIC MURDER includes a
fair dose of paleontology, forensics, Indian lore, and amber collecting.
Gentry manages to bring these disparate elements together to produce an
interesting and entertaining story.” Christine Gentry is a
psychologist living in North Carolina. She has written several fiction
and nonfiction books and taught courses on freelance writing and police
report writing for law enforcement professionals. Her interests include
dinosaurs, photography, and parapsychology. Her author website is www.
gentrybooksonline. com
