Dressed to Die

Forensic anthropologist Lindsay Chamberlain faces some very stiff challenges in her third appearance (Questionable Remains, 1997). She consults on the case of Shirley Foster, an art teacher at the University of Georgia in Athens, who has been missing for four years, and very quickly guides the authorities to a grave site on the Foster family's property. After Lindsay helps identify the remains as Foster's, she believes her part in the case is over, but events prove otherwise. In the meantime, her brother Sinjin appears for a visit, bringing some crates that had been stored on their archeologist grandfather's property. Filled with Native American artifacts of mysterious provenance, the crates also yield a skeleton wearing a shirt and tie. Could Lindsay's grandfather have been involved in both artifact smuggling and murder? When the artifacts disappear, the puzzle deepens. In Connor's latest multifaceted tale, the plot is serpentine, the solution ingenious, the academic politics vicious, and Lindsay is appealing. Although the dialogue occasionally is stilted and transitions are sometimes abrupt, this entertaining mystery is as chock-full of engrossing anthropological and archeological detail as a newly discovered burial mound. (Sept.)