Earning a place right next to the books of Dick Francis and Tony Hillerman are the engrossing mysteries of award-winning author Aaron Elkins. As the Chicago Sun-Times says: "Murder, a singular detective, a winning supporting cast, humor - what more could we want from a mystery?" Yet Elkins's Gideon Oliver novels do give us more: They engage the reader in a foray into the fascinating field of forensic anthropology, and they always happen in the very best places on earth for murder! His latest work, Dead Men's Hearts, is set in an unbeatable location for old bones and new skullduggery: the ruins of ancient Egypt. A promised role in a documentary film draws Gideon Oliver to Egypt's famed Valley of the Nile, where he expects an undemanding week of movie-star treatment plus a top-of-the-line cruise along the river with his wife, Julie. But a skeleton unexpectedly turns up in the garbage of the Egyptological institute where the filming starts. The bones, Gideon determines, are those of an anonymous Fifth Dynasty scribe who has been uneventfully gathering dust in a storeroom for seventy years. These venerable relics are cleaned, sorted, analyzed, and placed back in storage with all due respect. Sifting through bones is nothing new for the man known as the Skeleton Detective, but wandering skeletons are out of the ordinary. So when the same remains inexplicably wind up in another garbage heap a few days later - days during which a staff member has died under highly suspicious circumstances - Gideon hauls out his calipers for a second, longer look. What he discovers will send him and Julie through the bazaars and back alleys of modern Egypt and deep into the ancient Valley of the Kings. And asthe puzzle is pieced together, Gideon will find that the identifying traits of a cunning killer are timeless: greed without guilt, lies without conscience... and murder without remorse.
I'm a former anthropologist who has been writing mysteries and thrillers since 1982, having won an Edgar for Old Bones, as well as a subsequent Agatha (with my wife Charlotte), and a Nero Wolfe Award. My major continuing series features forensic anthropologist-detective Gideon Oliver, "the Skeleton Detective."
Lately, I've seen myself referred to as "the father of the modern forensic mystery," and, by gosh, I think I am! Before "Fellowship of Fear," the first Gideon Oliver, published in 1982, you'd have to go back 70 years and more to Austin Freeman and his Dr. Thorndyke series. Between the two good doctors (Thorndyke and Oliver), there was only Jack Klugman's "Quincy," so far as I know, and he was a TV character.
The Gideon Oliver books have been (roughly) translated into a major ABC-TV series and have been selections of the Book-of-the-Month Club, the Literary Guild, and the Readers Digest Condensed Mystery Series. My work has been published in a dozen languages. Charlotte and I live on Washington's Olympic Peninsula, our marriage having survived (more or less intact) our collaboration on novels and short stories.
Although I've been a full-time writer for some time now, I also remain active in real-life forensics by serving as the forensic anthropologist on the Olympic Peninsula Cold Case Task Force.
