Bone Hunter, by Sarah Andrews

Bone Hunter, by Sarah Andrews.  St. Martin's Press, 1999.  353 pp.  0-312-97317-9.

... in which a forensic geologist tracks down the murderer of a famous paleontologist.

This poor little battered up paperback has been following me around the United States since the summer of 2007, when I picked it up in a little bookshop in Jackson, Wyoming.  It then traveled with me to Montana, Idaho, back to Wyoming, back to Idaho, Missouri, back to Idaho again, and then Ohio.  Only now did I get around to reading it, and now I kind of see why I was putting it off, despite my natural affinity for geologists named Emily.

The premise is interesting... a geologist Emily Hansen has earned a reputation for using her geological knowledge to help detectives crack their murder cases.  Bone Hunter is from somewhere in the middle of the Em Hansen mystery series, but I did not find that previous knowledge of the series was necessary.  The story opens with Em arriving in Salt Lake City to attend a paleontology conference.  She's staying with a famous paleontologist, the sort of guy you see in documentaries on National Geographic.  Unfortunately for her, her host ends up dead in the Utah desert, and Em is the prime suspect.  To clear her name, Em teams up with a local cop and starts digging into the murder victim's secrets and questioning his colleagues.

As far as murder mystery protagonists go, Em Hansen is pretty unique.  She's not a cop or an FBI agent, and she doesn't have a special animal sidekick... all she has is a good understanding of stratigraphy and sedimentology.  The rest of the characters, however, are pretty by-the-book.

The plot of the book was pretty bland... it might be because Em was a suspect in the murder case, but she seemed to do a lot of following the cop around and reacting to what she learned from him, as opposed to much active investigation of her own.  She also doesn't get many opportunities to actually exercise her knowledge of geology, but that is probably also due to the fact that she's a suspect, not an independent consultant brought in to help on the case.  So, most of the book revolves around her chatting with the paleontologists at the conference, and finding out that the murder victim was involved with some Fundamentalist Mormons who lived deep in the desert.  The ending of the book is fairly action-packed, which makes up for the slower pace of the rest of the novel, but unfortunately the killer ends up being the most obvious person.  Never a good thing in a mystery.

I feel like this book was on the edge of being something really good... but ended up falling a little short.  From researching the series online, I gather that this book is actually something of a transition novel, since it introduces one character who becomes important later in the series.  In the end, I'd be willing to read other books from the series, not because of the strength of Bone Hunter, but because of the hint of what kind of book it could have been.

3/5 stars.

Remarkable Creatures, by Tracy Chevalier

Remarkable Creatures, by Tracy Chevalier.  Penguin Books, 2009.  312 pp.  978-0-452-29672-5.

... in which two women in 19th century England hunt for fossils and change the course of paleontology as a science.

Remarkable Creatures is the fictionalized account of the lives and friendship of two real women, Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot, who lived in Lyme Regis, a small town on the southern coast of England.  The story begins when Elizabeth Philpot moves to Lyme with her two sisters.  The Philpot sisters are members of the respectable upper class of English society, but when it became clear that all three sisters were destined for spinsterhood, their brother sent them from London to live modestly in a cottage in Lyme.  Upon arriving in Lyme, Elizabeth discovers a fondness for walking along the beach and finding fossils hidden in the cliffs exposed by the ocean.  Mary Anning, the daughter of a cabinetmaker in Lyme, soon begins to accompany Elizabeth on her fossil-hunting walks.  Although twenty years younger than Elizabeth, Mary soon proves to be a more talented fossil hunter and eventually Mary and Elizabeth form an unlikely friendship, despite being separated by England's rigid social strata.  The story follows Mary and Elizabeth through decades of friendship, as their discoveries of fossilized dinosaurs and marine reptiles begin to make their way to museums and are studies by the greatest scientists of the day.

This novel is certainly not an action-packed story.  Instead, the primary focus is on the unlikely friendship between the two women, and their continuous battle against the restraints imposed on them by their rigid society.  As a reference point, Elizabeth Philpot is a contemporary of Jane Austen, so all of the rules that applied in Austen's work are also present here.  The story alternates between Elizabeth's perspective and Mary's perspective, offering us glimpses into their lives in the respectable upper class and in the working class, respectively. 

Probably the most fascinating part of this book is the novelized glimpse it gives us into events which turn out to be historically significant.  When Elizabeth and Mary were finding their fantastic fossils of plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs, the scientific and religious communities of Europe were first beginning to address issues like extinction, age of the earth, and geologic change.  Scientists were tentatively suggesting that the earth was not created in seven days, and that at some point in the earth's history, animals had lived and gone extinct.  These ideas were challenged by the more literal-minded members of society, who insisted that the earth was 10,000 years old and that the concept of extinction challenged the supposition that God's creation was perfect and unchanging.  Mary Anning, considered to be one of the most significant women in the history of science, contributed greatly to this debate with her discovery of her fossils, and Elizabeth Philpot taught Mary about all of the ideas being presented by the great minds of geology.  Unfortunately, neither woman received much recognition for their contributions, though Mary Anning did achieve some fame for being a good specimen hunter.

The book is also peppered with appearances by some of the most significant scientists in modern times.  William Buckland, a prominent geologist who spent his life trying to bridge the gap between geologic evidence and Biblical literalism, is an important character in Mary and Elizabeth's lives, and is one of the first to publicly recognize Mary's contributions.  Georges Cuvier, the famous anatomist, makes a brief appearance.  At the end of the novel, a young Charles Lyell even drops by to pay a visit to Mary.  For those of you not well versed in the history of science, Charles Lyell is to geology as Isaac Newton is to physics.  Charles Lyell would go on to write his famous Principles of Geology, which went on to inspire ideas in people like Charles Darwin.  I wish I had read this book when I was a junior in college writing a term paper on the role of religion and geology in the 1800s!

But I digress.  The strength of this book is in the voice it gives to two extraordinary women who have been passed over by history.  As a fictionalized account of real events, I know the author had to have taken some artistic liberties, but nevertheless we are presented with two fully realized, three dimensional characters who defy the standards of their time to make their mark on the world.  My only complaint is that I wish the book had been longer, because the ending feels a bit rushed and crammed and story ends decades before either Mary or Elizabeth pass away.

Recommended reading for anyone with an interest in historical fiction, fossils and paleontology, or geology.
5/5 stars