Publisher Description
Edgar Award–winning series: On a trip to Glacier Bay, Alaska, the Skeleton Detective pursues a cold-hearted killer who buries evidence in an avalanche.
Gideon Oliver expects to be amicably bored when he takes on the role of “accompanying spouse” at a lodge in the magnificent wild country of Glacier Bay, Alaska, where his forest ranger wife, Julie, is attending a conference. But it turns out to be exactly his cup of tea. There is another group at the lodge: six scientists on a memorial journey to the site of a thirty‑year‑old glacial avalanche that killed three of their colleagues. Their leader is TV’s most popular science personality, the unctuous M. Audley Tremaine, who is the sole survivor of the fatal avalanche. But he does not survive long and is soon found hanged in his room. If that is not upsetting enough, shocked hikers discover human bones emerging from the foot of the glacier—are they the shattered remains of the three who died, finally seeing daylight after their two‑mile, three‑decade journey within the glacial flow?
When the FBI seeks expert help, everyone agrees how fortunate it is that Dr. Oliver, the famed Skeleton Detective, is on the scene. Everybody, that is, but the person who wants ancient history to stay that way—and who believes that murder is the surest way to keep the past buried.
Icy Clutches is the 6th book in the Gideon Oliver Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Physical anthropologist Gideon Oliver, earlier seen in Edgar-winner Old Bones , resumes his forensic sleuthing in this well-intentioned but wordy yarn. Having joined his wife on a professional junket to Alaska, Oliver is Johnny-on-the-spot when the survivors of a 1960 expedition discover bones. The leader, botanist M. Audley Tremaine, returns nearly 30 years later to unveil his book about the ill-fated trek to Tirku Glacier to the one other survivor, Walter Judd, and the relatives of those lost in an avalanche. But the remains of a skull found on the glacier reveal to Oliver that an ice pick had pierced it before the avalanche struck. Though Tremaine ostensibly hangs himself after hearing this news, Oliver suspects the scientist has been murdered. When Tremaine's manuscript and then the skeletal fragments are stolen, Oliver and the FBI have only the memories of Judd and the relatives to work with. The intrepid ``skeleton detective'' is nevertheless able to wrest the truth about the events on Tirku from its ``icy clutches.'' But the repetitive scientific analysis and an overwrought narrative dull the novel's potential for suspense.
