SLEEPING BONES

Forty thousand years after the La Brea Tar Pits claim the victims they immortalize as fossils, and 60 years after the discovery of Peking Man, something that looks uncannily like a mandible from the Chinese discovery, which vanished in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, turns up at the Tar Pits the very same day as the body of Herman Layton, one of the ex-Marines charged with removing the fossil from China way back when. The very next day, Layton’s daughter Peri, a paleoanthropological prodigy whose recent career has sputtered, announces major funding for her newest African dig. Coincidence? LAPD Homicide Detective Kate Delafield and her new partner Joe Cameron don’t think so. Neither does the CIA, which has latched onto the case as tightly as the Japanese on occupied China. Even as she’s following the dead-end leads that would tell her whether the jawbone is the genuine article or a clever copy—and trying to deal with her sudden dangerous attraction to Peri Layton, and wondering how to neutralize her friend Marcie Grissom’s abusive ex, and coming to terms with the long-lost brother who’s erupted without warning into her life—Kate is struggling to balance her loyalty to the Job with the peremptory demands of CIA case officer Nicholas Whitby, whose ideas of national security makes him a modern mastodon ripe for tarring. So many moral dilemmas crowd Kate’s seventh (Apparition Alley, 1997, etc.), in fact, that murder and detection play distinctly supporting roles.