Switcheroo

The Skeleton Detective is back.

A cold case dating from the 1960s draws forensic anthropologist Gideon Oliver to the Channel Islands decades later to shine a light on the mysterious connection between two men who died there on the same night.

Swapped as young boys by their fathers during the Nazi occupation, wealthy Roddy Carlisle and middle-class George Skinner had some readjusting to do after the war ended—but their lives remained linked through work, trouble with the law, and finally, it would seem, through murder.

Nobody expects that Gideon’s modern-day investigation will turn up fresh bodies. But old bones tell many tales, and the Skeleton Detective has to be at his sharpest to piece together the truth before the body count mounts still higher.

Declared “a series that never disappoints” by the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Gideon Oliver mystery series is highly recommended for fans of Agatha Christie and Kathy Reichs.

Former forensic anthropology professor and Edgar Award winner Aaron Elkins can’t seem to let go of the past—he has written his eighteenth book featuring the globetrotting Skeleton Detective, Gideon Oliver. Often credited with launching the forensic mystery genre in the early 1980s with Fellowship of Fear, Elkins has written nonfiction articles for the New York Times travel magazine, Smithsonian magazine, and Writer’s Digest. His books have been made into a major ABC television series and have been published in over a dozen languages. In addition to the Edgar, which he won for Old Bones, his fourth Gideon Oliver book, he has also won a Nero Award and shared an Agatha Award with his wife and coauthor, Charlotte Elkins. Elkins lives in a small town on the Washington coast, where (when he’s not writing) he serves as the forensic anthropologist for the Olympic Peninsula Cold Case Task Force.