‘Mesozic Murder’ by Christine Gentry
Published by Poisoned Pen Press. June 2007.
ISBN 1-59058-388-4

Christine Gentry’s book concerns the adventures of Ansel Phoenix, freelance paleoartist in Big Tie , North Eastern Montana.  Ansel is an artist who draws dinosaurs and is the president of the Pangaea Society which is concerned with the study of fossils.  She is teaching students how to dig for fossils at a site on the land of a pig breeder when she and her students unearth a body.  The body turns out to be that of Nick Capos, Ansel’s colleague, and he has been poisoned.  Ansel starts to investigate his activities during the last months of his life and finds that he has been involved with a secret project which concerns fossils in some way. 

Presumably because of her investigations she becomes the target of a stalker.  Don’t imagine she is a shrinking violet frightened of being attacked!   Ansel is angry when roused so she decides to beef up her defences and to keep her gun handy at all times - as she puts it ‘in Montana, PMS stood for Pass My Shotgun’!   Ansel has faced prejudice throughout her life as half-Anglo and half-Blackfoot and she has coped with that admirably without building such a carapace that she can feel nothing.  I was totally involved with Ansel’s adventures and caught up with her relationships, lifestyle and skills.  There are several writers setting their detective fiction in the archaeology field and fossil hunting and paleontology seems to be a potential subgenre. 
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Jennifer S. Palmer
The book has a sequel, Carnosaur Crimes,which is an equally compelling read.