A Rumor of Bones (Lindsay Chamberlain Mysteries)

Das Setting des Krimis liegt bei und am Rande einer Ausgrabung. Der Hauptcharakter, eine Archäologin, sowie die Nebencharaktere wurden gut eingeführt und sind gut beschrieben und passten natürlich gut zum Setting. Neben dem Kriminalfall gibt es auch interessante Konflikte zwischen den Charakteren und eine Familie, die ein bisschen neben der Spur ist.

I enjoyed it even more this second time around. So good I had trouble putting it down at bed time.

This is the first installment of the Lindsay Chamberlain mysteries and I found it to be very good. I have read several of the later books in the series and have enjoyed them very much. It was nice to see how it all started. I learned a lot about archeology and how bones can give us so much information. I would recommend this to anyone interested in the subject or who just wants to read a well written mystery and likes to learn new things.

Excellent

So, my mother recently wanted to go buy a whole lot of very cheap books at the perpetual library sale at the Park Hills Library, an admirable method used by that library to keep less popular books in circulation. You’d think no one in our family received books as gifts for Christmas, which I assure you is not true. I think my mother feels more comfortable if she has fifty books or more on her TBR stacks, which I’m sure we can all understand.Naturally I went along, thus increasing my already tottering TBR pile by five or so titles. One of the books I picked up was the second book of Beverly Conner's Lindsay Chamberlain series, <i>Questionable Remains</i>. I liked it a lot, picked up the first book on Kindle, then got the rest and actually zipped through the whole series in about a week. So these comments concern the whole series, not just the first book.I don’t actually read mysteries for the mystery. I read them for character and setting, but I do like them better if I am also baffled by the mystery or surprised by the plot. I won't say every aspect of every mystery is a surprise, but in each book there are enough details I didn't see coming that I really enjoyed finding out whodunit.But more than the mystery plots, I definitely appreciate Lindsay Chamberlain as the protagonist. The archaeology and forensic anthropology are both just fascinating:<i>Lindsay took the brush and dusted the skull. It had been partially flattened from years of decay, heavy topsoil, and, Lindsay supposed, from farm equipment running over it, but certain features caught her eye. First, the very narrow nasal passage, then the slightly rectangular eye sockets: telltale signs of a Caucasian skull. She looked closely at the teeth, which she believed had an overbite instead of the usual even-edged occlusion of people of Asian ancestry. Lindsay touched the zygomatic arch with her finger. She would have to wait until the skull was out of the ground, but she was relatively sure that these were not the forward-projecting cheekbones of an Indian skull, but the more recessed ones of a European.</i>It’s all very interesting! And not dry in the least, at least not for me, because all these details are woven together with Lindsay’s personal reactions and with human-level stories of the dead, what they were feeling and thinking, what their lives involved. I grant you, if you are not somewhat interested in archaeology or forensics or both, your mileage might vary.Other notable features of this series:1) Lindsay herself is a good protagonist. She is curious, determined, highly competent, kind and yet capable of emotional detachment; also strongly inclined to imagine the lives (and deaths) of the people she encounters. Thus she gets involved despite herself. She’s very good at spotting connections between things, so people come to her for help sorting things out. There’s no feeling that she is trying to involve herself in things she ought to stay out of; it’s more that even though she’s trying to stay out of things, her desire to help the people who come to her plus her own curiosity won’t let her. It’s all pretty believable, despite the occasional odd coincidence required to keep Lindsay at the center of events. Less believable are the slightly too frequent moments when she goes off by herself, nobody knows where she is, and she gets assaulted or falls down a well or whatever. This might not be as noticeable if I hadn't been zipping through the series so fast.I will add that Lindsay is startlingly good at a number of things not related to her profession. For example, she’s a professional-level dancer. This is okay with me, but only just barely. It seems a bit much. In the same way, I do wish her mother hadn’t given her a stallion as a gift. I have a hard time believing a real expert would give her daughter, a casual rider, a stallion. Why not a gelding or a mare? I could be wrong, I guess. I don't know Arabians that well. Maybe lots of Arabian stallions are actually easy to own and train. But this feels to me like a detail added by an author who doesn’t really know that much about horses and thinks "stallion" sounds romantic and cool.2) The secondary characters are fairly well drawn, though most have a fairly small role. I found this off-and-on thing with her sometime-boyfriend / sometime-dancing partner / sometime colleague Derrick a bit off-putting. I felt he ought to be able to cope with her occasional involvement with crimes considering she is often consulted by the police. It seemed to me he wants her to be a smaller, less skilled person than she is and I didn't care for that very much. But in the 4th and 5th books, I like her new boyfriend much better. Also, in the third book, I like her brother very much. And I just love her new department head, Lewis, had in the later books. Given the development of the secondary characters, I did like the later books of the series a bit better than the earlier ones.3) I feel I should mention that these are not cozy mysteries. Despite the romantic interests I mentioned above, the romantic elements are minimal, the crimes can be more awful than one expects in a cozy – thankfully these are not shown explicitly – and also various scenes are much more tense and suspenseful than I’d expect in a cozy. The extended cave scene in the second book is really something. You wouldn’t want to start reading that part and then quit in the middle, let me tell you. It reminded me very much of the bit in the <a href="http://thebooksmugglers.com/2017/12/presenting-touchstone-trilogy-andrea-k-host.html">Touchstone trilogy</a> where Cassandra is lost in that underwater cavern system. Terrifying.4) The writing is basically straightforward and doesn’t call much attention to itself. These are mysteries my mother would like because they’re well-enough written and because there’s no crude language and no explicit casual sex – she avoids a lot of modern mysteries because of those elements. Also, I don’t think the writing comes across as too textbook-y, even when something technical is being explained.Overall, thoroughly recommended. If Conner writes any more books in this series, I will grab them right up. And I will definitely be trying her other series.