The Fossil Hunter
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- €6.99
Publisher Description
A fossil discovered at London's Natural History Museum leads one woman back in time to nineteenth century Australia and a world of scientific discovery and dark secrets in this compelling historical mystery.
The Hunter Valley 1847
The last thing Mellie Vale remembers before the fever takes her is running through the bush as a monster chases her - but no one believes her story. In a bid to curb Mellie's overactive imagination, her benefactors send her to visit a family friend, Anthea Winstanley. Anthea is an amateur palaeontologist with a dream. She is convinced she will one day find proof the great sea dragons - the ichthyosaur and the plesiosaur - swam in the vast inland sea that millions of years ago covered her property at Bow Wow Gorge. Soon, Mellie shares that dream for she loves fossil hunting too...
1919
When Penelope Jane Martindale arrives home from the battlefields of World War I with the intention of making her peace with her father and commemorating the death of her two younger brothers in the trenches, her reception is not as she had hoped. Looking for distraction, she finds a connection between a fossil at London's Natural History museum and her brothers which leads her to Bow Wow Gorge. But the gorge has a sinister reputation - 70 years ago people disappeared. So when PJ uncovers some unexpected remains, it seems as if the past is reaching into the present and she becomes determined to discover what really happened all that time ago...
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Tantalising secrets of the Australian landscape—both real and imagined—linger over Téa Cooper’s twofold historical mystery. When superstitious scullery maid Mellie Vale is sent away to glean some needed enlightenment from an amateur palaeontologist, the pair set out to prove the past existence of an inland sea and its fantastic inhabitations via the emerging fossil record. Seventy years later, a separate narrative unfolds as P.J. Martindale heads to Australia in the wake of World War I. Coping with loss and estrangement in her family, P.J. immerses herself in the story of several girls who went missing from a gorge in the previous century. As the dual timelines unfold in parallel, the author recreates two distinctive eras with exquisite period detail and an abundant fondness for science.
