Murder in the Queen's Armes, by Aaron Elkins

In this, the third installment in the Gideon Oliver series, Gideon and his new bride, Julia Tendler (whom he had met and fallen in love with in The Dark Place), are on their honeymoon in England. Dorchester, to be precise.



In the prologue, Gideon visits a small museum, the Greater Dorchester Museum of History and Archaeology, to see their famous "Poundbury Man" - a thirty-thousand year old parieto-occipital calvareal fragment. But it has been stolen.

Next, Gideon wants to visit an old friend, Nathan Marcus, an American archaelogist who has riled British archaeologists with his brash manner. He has found a site which he believes will revolutionize the history of stone-age man, but dark deeds are afoot.... is Nate a con-man, or are his rival archaeologists out to get him?

The series
Fellowship of Fear (1982)
The Dark Place (1983)
Murder in the Queen's Armes (1985)
Old Bones (1987)
Curses! (1989)
Icy Clutches (1990)
Make No Bones (1991)
Dead Men's Hearts (1994)
Twenty Blue Devils (1997)
Skeleton Dance (2000)
Good Blood (2004)
Where There's a Will (2005)
Unnatural Selection (2006)
Little Tiny Teeth (2007)
Uneasy Relations (2008)
Skull Duggery (2009)

The Dark Place, by Aaron Elkins

The Dark Place, by Aaron Elkins, is the second in the Gideon Oliver series. In Fellowship of Fear, the widowed Oliver meets a woman, however he is alone at the beginning of The Dark Place. However, we are reintroduced to FBI agent John Lau. Mysterious happenings occur in the Olympic National Park, in Olympia, Washington State. Six years ago, two hikers disappeared. A few days ago, a woman has disappeared. When some bones are found, John Lau asks Gideon Oliver, who is working at a dig at Dungeness, to come look at them.

Once at the park, Gideon meets park ranger Julie Tendler, and works with John Lau to solve the mystery of the disappearing hikers.

Sample paragraphs

John held open the door, and Gideon awkwardly bowed Julie through, not at all sure if she would like the gesture. She went through with a pleasant smile, and they stepped out into the town of Quinault. It was a shock. They had entered the hotel building from a spacious, sunny lawn peopled with sunbathers and laughing volleyball players, and with ten square miles of open lake at their backs. When they walked out through the rear entrance, no more than forty feet away, they stepped into a sunless shadowy world of almost solid green, hushed and perceptibly cooler and more moist than the lawn.

The "town," invisible from the air, consisted of several buildings out of the nineteenth century along either side of a narrow road. On the right was an old post office and a weathered, rustic general store - Lake Quinault Merc, the sign said - with a wooden porch complete with an old dog sprawled lazily on it. On the left was the Quinault Ranger Station, a group of small frame houses. Everything was dwarfed and hemmed in by towering walls of cedar and spruce, so tall and close together that the sky was only visible as a narrow slit high above the road. The road itself gave the illusion of being cut off at either end by more tree walls, and the overall effect was like being at the bottom of a sunken corridor, a narrow, gravelike canyon cut deep in the living mass of trees.

Elkins gives the story an excellent sense of place. Makes you long to visit there... see if it still exists as he described. (Aarons and his wife still live in Olympia, Washington.)

The only flaw in the book is that Gideon manages to learn a foreign language in 24 hours...I don't really think that's possible. But if you suspend your disbelief, it's an enjoyable book.

The Gideon Oliver series
Fellowship of Fear (1982)
The Dark Place (1983)
Murder in the Queen's Armes (1985)
Old Bones (1987)
Curses! (1989)
Icy Clutches (1990)
Make No Bones (1991)
Dead Men's Hearts (1994)
Twenty Blue Devils (1997)
Skeleton Dance (2000)
Good Blood (2004)
Where There's a Will (2005)
Unnatural Selection (2006)
Little Tiny Teeth (2007)
Uneasy Relations (2008)
Skull Duggery (2009)

Fellowship of Fear, by Aaron Elkins

Fellowship of Fear, by Aaron Elkins, is the very first Gideon Oliver mystery, and it is atypical of the series. It is more of a spy novel than a detective novel.



Gideon's past history is introduced, including the death of a beloved spouse. He comes to Germany as a guest-lecturer at Army Air Bases in Germany...only a lot of people seem to think he's much more... like a spy.

Here are a few sample paragraphs:

Gideon Oliver was not a conventionally handsome man, and he knew it. He also knew that his big frame, broken nose, and soft borwn eyes gave him a gentle ruggedness that many women found attractive.

He was by no means on the prowl. His wife of nine years, whom he had loved wthi all his soul, had died in an automobile accident two years earlier, and just as he had found no one to compare with her when she was alive, he had found no one since, and he wasn't even looking hard. Still, even if not overtly susceptible to women, he was by no means immune, and felt, through the wine-induced lassitude, a familiar stirring whenever Janet rearranged her long legs and looked briefly at him wiht unmistakeably friendly intent.

The other two at the table had contributed less to the evening's pleasures. Bruce Danzig, the faculty librarian, was a fussy little man with fussy little hands and feet and a neat little lump of a pot belly - like a cantaloupe - across the exact center of which his belt lay. He delivered his words with irritating precision, pursing and stretching his lips lest a single phoneme emerge incompletely rounded.

On Gideon's other side, between him and Janet, saw Eric Bozzini, assistant professor of psychology. Three times during the meal he described himself as a laid-back Californian, and groomed himself for the part: long hair, neatly trimmed into a sort of boy cut below the ears, a Pancho Villa mustache, tinted glasses that never seemed to come off, and an open-throated shirt revealing some sort of canine attached to a thin, gold chain and nestling on a tanned, hairy chest. But at something near Gideon's own age of thirty-eight, the image was wearing a little thing; a widow's peak was discernible under the brushed forward hairline, the face was a little fleshy, the chest a trifle puffy and soft-looking. Even the bronze skin seemed sunlamp induced.

The series
Fellowship of Fear (1982)
The Dark Place (1983)
Murder in the Queen's Armes (1985)
Old Bones (1987)
Curses! (1989)
Icy Clutches (1990)
Make No Bones (1991)
Dead Men's Hearts (1994)
Twenty Blue Devils (1997)
Skeleton Dance (2000)
Good Blood (2004)
Where There's a Will (2005)
Unnatural Selection (2006)
Little Tiny Teeth (2007)
Uneasy Relations (2008)
Skull Duggery (2009)