Little Tiny Teeth (A Gideon Oliver Mystery)

Little Tiny Teeth (A Gideon Oliver Mystery)

A new mystery to chill the bones-from the Edgar(r) Award-winning author of Unnatural Selection . When forensics professor Gideon Oliver joins an Amazon riverboat expedition with a group of research botanists, he expects a nice vacation. What he gets is heat, corrupt officials, dangerous insects and animals-and worse. As they travel upriver, one of the botanists is killed by a deranged passenger who leaps overboard and flees into the darkness. No one can explain why. Theories begin to simmer, and stories of long-past, half-forgotten grudges-and new ones as well-boil to the surface. Only when a fresh skeleton turns up in the river, scoured to the bone by voracious piranhas, does Gideon realize that in this jungle full of predators, humans may be the deadliest of all. Elkins, who has won the Edgar Award for his Gideon Oliver series, trots out forensic anthropology professor Oliver for another adventure, this time along the Amazon River. Elkins totally avoids the sin of sloth represented by some mystery writers who habitually underresearch their topics. Elkins always presents a rich buffet of fascinating scientific facts, and this time his table overflows with information about the Amazon's wildlife and, even more intriguingly, its plant life, long used by natives as medicine and now studied by medical ethnobotanists. Elkins, generous with background, is a bit too generous with setup: by the time Professor Oliver and the research botanists actually get to the Amazon, readers may be tired of the overly long, and-then-there-were-none-style introductions to each character. Once underway on the Amazon, however, things quickly pick up, as a shrunken head, carried by a spear, lands on deck, and Oliver's detective skills are called into play when one of the botanists is murdered. Learned and entertaining. Connie Fletcher Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Aaron Elkins is the author of the Edgar Award-winning Gideon Oliver mysteries.