New Hard-Boiled Detective Series Uncovers Bones, Murder & History. Gold medal, best novel, Fiction--Mystery/Thriller, Midwest Book Awards Paleontologist turned private investigator, Harry Przewalski, excavates the dirty underbelly of people's lives, unearthing sexual betrayals, treachery, fraud and murder buried beneath the science of petrified shards, skin and bones. Ultimately, he must face a brutal killing in his own past, when he fled to a desert war and came back with a gun and a license to detect. In his second case, Death Spoke, a university dean, a renowned expert in prehistoric cave art, is murdered in her motel bed at five in the morning. Moments later, a waitress is bludgeoned at a truck-stop diner next to the motel. Hours later, an archaeology professor suffers a violent bicycle crash on a highway 35 miles further east. Przewalski excavates the deadly archaeological layers of the case, finding lives torn by deceit, vendetta and redemption. The dean's ruthless academic politics brought her power and deadly enemies. Was she killed as payback for her sexual blackmail? As archaeologist, her shocking discoveries threatened to ruin professional careers. Was the art in one of the most celebrated caves forged to attract tourists? And who were the cave artists--who painted the luminous bison, deer, mammoths, and horses on the cave walls? And why? Were they hunters? Or shamans? Or social outcasts shunned by the tribe? The second installment in the Harry Przewalski series. The first book in the series is The Bone Field..