Death Assemblage

Frankie MacFarlane hasn't come to derelict Pair-a-Dice, Nev., for its 21 slot machines, or even its three bars or seven pool tables; she's there for the rocks the ones she's surveying for her geology dissertation. But this heroine of a new series by geologist Susan Cummins Miller, inaugurated with the assured and erudite Death Assemblage, gets tangled up with the eccentrics of the truck-stop town when two recent murders seem tied to ancient violence that she's discovered in her geological research.