Mesozoic Murder

"Gentry's appealing heroine, who gets ample opportunity to display her resourcefulness and fortitude, and the intriguing milieu in which she operates, should ensure both a warm reception and a speedy encore."—Publishers Weekly Ansel Phoenix draws dinosaurs for magazines, books, and museum displays. But 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, and not trusting the Big Toe police who've an axe to grind with her father, Ansel decides to investigate what Capos had been doing during the last few months of his life. She 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—a master predator who will stop at nothing. Why is Nick's fossil collection missing and why had he developed a recent interest in Baltic amber? Ansel must also deal with the challenges of her own half-Anglo, half-Blackfoot heritage; with her ranching family and the changes threatening their rural community; and with more than one Mesozoic mystery....

"[T]he snowballing pace will keep the reader turning the pages until the unexpected finish."—Publishers Weekly When paleoartist Ansel Phoenix finds a burnt body hanging from the mouth of her life-sized Allosaurus replica outside the Big Toe Natural History Museum, she starts digging. An Indian poacher has been cutting out fossil carnosaur tracks along the Redwater River, and the Bureau of Land Management is threatening to close the museum and move the tracks to an educational institution. And the FBI is freezing out the local cops. Using her half-Blackfoot heritage as leverage, Ansel devises a dangerous scheme to help the FBI expose a statewide fossil-poaching ring. But she didn't count on starting a new romance, stumbling over a heinous BLM land-grabbing plot, or being stalked by a deadly nemesis from her childhood.

One morning on Moonlight Beach in Southern California, a body of a young woman is discovered deceased on the shore. This leads Detectives Lance Clayton & Yolanda Black on a homicide case spanning the existence of life on the planet they call 'Earth'...

Frankie MacFarlane visits Pair-a-Dice, Nevada to study rocks for her geology dissertation, but gets involved in a mystery when two recent murders seem tied to ancient violence that she's discovered in her geological research.

By identifying similarities in various books, this annual selection guide helps readers to independently choose titles of interest published in the last year.Each entry describes a separate book, listing everything readers need to know to make selections. Arranged by author within six genre sections, detailed entries provide: Title Publisher and publication dateSeriesNames and descriptions of charactersTime period and geographical settingReview citationsStory typesBrief plot summarySelected other books by the authorSimilar books by different authorsAuthor, title, series, character name, character description, time period, geographic setting and genre/sub-genre indexes are included to facilitate research.

A fascinating view of the Soviet system at the beginning of the Stalin Terror among intellectuals.

A Hudson Booksellers Staff Pick for the Best Books of 2013 One of Publishers Weekly's Top Ten Spring Science Books A Bookshop Santa Cruz Staff Pick Dinosaurs, with their awe-inspiring size, terrifying claws and teeth, and otherworldly abilities, occupy a sacred place in our childhoods. They loom over museum halls, thunder through movies, and are a fundamental part of our collective imagination. In My Beloved Brontosaurus, the dinosaur fanatic Brian Switek enriches the childlike sense of wonder these amazing creatures instill in us. Investigating the latest discoveries in paleontology, he breathes new life into old bones. Switek reunites us with these mysterious creatures as he visits desolate excavation sites and hallowed museum vaults, exploring everything from the sex life of Apatosaurus and T. rex's feather-laden body to just why dinosaurs vanished. (And of course, on his journey, he celebrates the book's titular hero, "Brontosaurus"—who suffered a second extinction when we learned he never existed at all—as a symbol of scientific progress.) With infectious enthusiasm, Switek questions what we've long held to be true about these beasts, weaving in stories from his obsession with dinosaurs, which started when he was just knee-high to a Stegosaurus. Endearing, surprising, and essential to our understanding of our own evolution and our place on Earth, My Beloved Brontosaurus is a book that dinosaur fans and anyone interested in scientific progress will cherish for years to come.