Новинки Аарон Дж. Элкинс

For Bryan Bennett, designing hostage negotiation programs is the perfect job—as long as he doesn’t deal directly with kidnappers or their victims. Intense nightmares of his own abduction and imprisonment as a small boy still plague him thirty-some years later, and claustrophobia prevents him from attempting to travel. So when Bryan’s boss asks him to fly to Reykjavik to teach his corporate-level kidnapping and extortion seminar, he initially refuses. But a CEO has specifically requested Bryan—or no one else. Finally Bryan relents… For decades he’s treaded gingerly around his deepest terrors. Now, on this trip, Bryan’s taken hostage…

No one solves crimes like Skeleton Detective Gideon Oliver. Gideon and his wife are on vacation in Mexico when a local police chief requests his assistance on a case. A mummified corpse was discovered in the desert and the coroner believed the victim was shot. But Gideon's examination reveals the victim was stabbed with a Phillips-head screwdriver. Then Gideon is asked to examine the skeleton of a murder victim found a year earlier-only to discover another error. The coroner misidentified the remains as belonging to a twelve to fifteen-year-old girl, when in fact the remains were that of a young woman of twenty. Gideon knows these two…

It is the kind of news that would normally send champagne corks flying at the Seattle Art Museum. A famous French art collector wants to give the museum an original Rembrandt! So why isn't Chris Norgren, curator of Renaissance and Baroque Art, smiling? Perhaps because the gift seems too good to be true. And there are conditions that make Chris nervous: The collector is the elderly Rene Vachey, one of the world's more controversial eccentrics. The Rembrandt has come out of nowhere - in fact, from a Paris junk shop - with no known history of ownership. Vachey will let Chris examine the painting, but he's not allowed to make scientific tests before he officially accepts the painting for the museum. Could the whole episode be a cruel hoax? Chris knows that if he authenticates the painting and it's a fake, he'll have embarrassed both himself and his museum. But if he rejects Vachey's gift, and the Rembrandt turns out to be real, he'll also look like a fool and Seattle will have lost a magnificent art treasure. Chris flies to France to leave a look for himself. The trip, which comes at an inconvenient time in Chris's shaky love life, soon takes a sinister and deadly turn. Chris must use all his wits and expertise in a perplexing quest for a killer, the evaluation of a painting that might or might not be a Rembrandt, and the untangling of a complex man's many-layered past. Old Scores is rich with European ambiance, fascinating art lore, and a compelling, insider's view of a rarefied world that few of us ever see. It is the work of a master.

There is not much left of the irascible Albert Evan Jasper, dean of American forensic anthropologists, after his demise in a fiery car crash. But in accord with his wishes, his remains a few charred bits of bone are installed in an Oregon museum to create a fascinating if macabre exhibit. All agree that it is a fitting end for a great forensic scientist until what is left of him disappears in the midst of the biannual meeting (a.k.a., the bone bash and weenie roast ) of the august WAFA the Western Association of Forensic Anthropologists in nearby Bend, Oregon.

Like his fellow attendees, Gideon Oliver the Skeleton Detective is baffled. Only the WAFA attendees could possibly have made off with the remains, but who in the world would steal something like that? And why? All had an opportunity, but who had a motive?

Soon enough, the discovery of another body in a nearby shallow grave will bring to the fore a deeper, more urgent mystery, and when one of the current attendees is found dead in his cabin, all hell breaks loose.
Gideon Oliver is now faced with the most difficult challenge of his career unmasking a dangerous, brilliant killer who knows every bit as much about forensic science as he does. Or almost.

"The Skeleton Detective" is called to a French isle soon after an aristocrat drowns. But he soon finds that the case is eerily connected to another murder--way back during the Nazi Occupation of World War II France.