Aaron Elkins Books In Order

Gideon Oliver Books In Publication Order

  1. Fellowship of Fear (1982)
  2. The Dark Place (1983)
  3. Murder in the Queen’s Armes (1985)
  4. Old Bones (1987)
  5. Curses! (1989)
  6. Icy Clutches (1990)
  7. Make No Bones (1991)
  8. Dead Men’s Hearts (1994)
  9. Twenty Blue Devils (1997)
  10. Skeleton Dance (2000)
  11. Good Blood (2004)
  12. Where There’s a Will (2005)
  13. Unnatural Selection (2006)
  14. Little Tiny Teeth (2007)
  15. Uneasy Relations (2008)
  16. Skull Duggery (2009)
  17. Dying on the Vine (2012)
  18. Switcheroo (2016)

The Chris Norgren Mysteries Books In Publication Order

  1. A Deceptive Clarity (1987)
  2. A Glancing Light (1991)
  3. Old Scores (1993)

Lee Ofsted Books In Publication Order

  1. A Wicked Slice (1989)
  2. Rotten Lies (1995)
  3. Nasty Breaks (1997)
  4. Where Have All the Birdies Gone? (2004)
  5. On the Fringe (2005)

Alix London Books In Publication Order

  1. A Dangerous Talent (2012)
  2. A Cruise to Die For (2013)
  3. The Art Whisperer (2014)
  4. The Trouble with Mirrors (2016)

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. Loot (1999)
  2. Turncoat (2002)
  3. The Worst Thing (2011)
  4. A Long Time Coming (2018)

Gideon Oliver Book Covers

The Chris Norgren Mysteries Book Covers

Lee Ofsted Book Covers

Alix London Book Covers

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Aaron Elkins Books Overview

Fellowship of Fear

The first novel featuring Gideon Oliver, ‘The Skeleton Detective.’

The Dark Place

The Dark Place finds forensic anthropologist Gideon Oliver on a trail that stretches from prehistoric times to present danger.

Murder in the Queen’s Armes

The third novel in the Edgar Award winning Gideon Oliver series now with an eye catching new package. No sooner do the anthropologist and his bride check into the Queen’s Armes than a mystery gets underfoot at a nearby dig. A battered body is discovered instead of the anticipated Bronze Age relic…
. Reissue.

Old Bones

‘The Skeleton Detective’ is called to a French isle soon after an aristocrat drowns. But he soon finds that the case is eerily connected to another murder way back during the Na*zi Occupation of World War II France.

Curses!

‘Mayan ruins in the Yucat n a secret room in a tomb age old skeletons. To anthropologist Gideon Oliver, the renowned Skeleton Detective, the invitation to join the archaeological excavation of Tlaloc promises two months of paradise on earth. That is, until an ancient series of Mayan curses against desecrators of the site is unearthed. When the first one comes to pass ”The bloodsucking kinkajou will come freely among them”, it’s taken by all as a practical joke. But by the time the fourth one is apparently consummated ”The one called Xecotcavach will pierce their skulls so that their brains spill onto the earth”, nerves have begun to fray and suspicions and discord to mount. The steamy jungles weigh down upon the band of eccentric anthropologists as one by one the curses continue to materialize. It takes Gideon’s special talents for deduction along with the enigmatic insights of Mexico’s one and only Mayan Indian inspector of the state judicial police to resolve an ancient riddle and a modern, murderous mystery.’

Icy Clutches

‘Gideon Oliver expects to be amicably bored when he takes on the role of accompanying spouse at a lodge in the magnificent wild country of Glacier Bay, Alaska, where his forest ranger wife Julie is attending a conference. But it turns out to be exactly his cup of tea. There is another group at the lodge: six scientists on a memorial journey to the site of a thirty year old glacial avalanche that killed three of their colleagues. Their leader is TV’s most popular science personality, the unctuous M. Audley Tremaine, who is the sole survivor of the fatal avalanche. But he doesn t survive long, and is soon found hanged in his room. If that isn t upsetting enough, shocked hikers discover human bones emerging from the foot of the glacier are they the shattered remains of the three who died, finally seeing daylight after their two mile. three decade journey within the glacial flow? When the FBI seek expert help, everyone agrees how fortunate it is that Dr. Oliver, the famed Skeleton Detective, is on the scene. Everybody, that is, but the person who wants ancient history to stay that way and who believes that murder is the surest way to keep the past buried.’

Make No Bones

Gideon Oliver must excuse himself from the festivities of the biennial anthropological convention, bone bash, and weenie roast in order to investigate the disappearance of the remains of Dr. Albert Jasper, previously housed in an Oregon museum. PW.

Dead Men’s Hearts

Earning a place right next to the books of Dick Francis and Tony Hillerman are the engrossing mysteries of award winning author Aaron Elkins. As the Chicago Sun Times says: ‘Murder, a singular detective, a winning supporting cast, humor what more could we want from a mystery?’ Yet Elkins’s Gideon Oliver novels do give us more: They engage the reader in a foray into the fascinating field of forensic anthropology, and they always happen in the very best places on earth for murder! His latest work, Dead Men’s Hearts, is set in an unbeatable location for old bones and new skullduggery: the ruins of ancient Egypt. A promised role in a documentary film draws Gideon Oliver to Egypt’s famed Valley of the Nile, where he expects an undemanding week of movie star treatment plus a top of the line cruise along the river with his wife, Julie. But a skeleton unexpectedly turns up in the garbage of the Egyptological institute where the filming starts. The bones, Gideon determines, are those of an anonymous Fifth Dynasty scribe who has been uneventfully gathering dust in a storeroom for seventy years. These venerable relics are cleaned, sorted, analyzed, and placed back in storage with all due respect. Sifting through bones is nothing new for the man known as the Skeleton Detective, but wandering skeletons are out of the ordinary. So when the same remains inexplicably wind up in another garbage heap a few days later days during which a staff member has died under highly suspicious circumstances Gideon hauls out his calipers for a second, longer look. What he discovers will send him and Julie through the bazaars and back alleys of modern Egypt and deep into the ancient Valley of the Kings. And asthe puzzle is pieced together, Gideon will find that the identifying traits of a cunning killer are timeless: greed without guilt, lies without conscience…
and murder without remorse.

Twenty Blue Devils

The dead man is the manager of Tahiti’s Paradise Coffee plantation, producer of the most expensive coffee bean in the world the winey, luscious Blue Devil. His fall from a cliff is the latest accident in a string of mishaps, and although nothing tangible points to foul play, FBI agent John Lau has his suspicions. What he needs is evidence and the best forensic expert in the business, his friend anthropologist Gideon Oliver, the Skeleton Detective. Gideon likes his java strong and his bones ancient, dry, and dusty. But the body he must examine had lain in the tropical sun for a week before it was found, and then buried native style, without a casket. If this case is not exactly Gideon’s cup of…
well, tea, it is not the state of the remains that bothers him. It’s the real human ugliness he suspects he’ll soon unearth. To make matters worse, Gideon finds trouble in paradise: a most unwelcoming local police commandant, a strange reluctance by the Blue Devil owners to uncover any wrong doing, and the lack of an exhumation order. Sneaking into a graveyard with a shovel and flashlight isn’t his idea of a professional analysis. And what he finds six feet under will prove the ultimate test of his skills: a subtle clue that points to foul play, and bones so puzzling that they have Gideon stumped…
for a while. Now Gideon must cut to the heart of a crime to find the motive that may have percolated through a family for decades and brewed a taste for murder.

Skeleton Dance

There is a small village in France that is well known for pate de foie gras…
and bones. Boasting the largest concentration of prehistoric fossils in Europe, Les Eyzies de Tayac is the home of the prestigious Institut de Prehistoire where eminent scientists study and squabble…
and perhaps, on occasion, commit murder. Professor Gideon Oliver knows bones. That’s why the mild mannered sometime investigator is the forensic specialist the Chief Inspector in Les Eyzies calls when a local dog emerges from a nearby cave carrying parts of a human skeleton and a not all that long ago interred one at that. But murder piles on murder and surprise upon electrifying surprise following Gideon’s arrival, as his search for answers leads him quickly, into the darkest corners of the scientific community…
and sets him on a shocking trail of death, greed, and deception nearly forty thousand years in the making.

Good Blood

What was supposed to be an Italian vacation for forensic anthropologist Gideon Oliver and his wife turns into a busman’s holiday when their hosts’ only child goes missing and nearby construction workers unearth human bones. The family awaits Oliver’s conclusions with both dread and cautious hope. But along the way, he’ll expose some extraordinary deceptions that lay bare the long hidden secrets at the dark heart of a highborn family.

Where There’s a Will

Alex Torkelsson has just gotten word: after going missing ten years ago, Alex’s late uncle Magnus’s plane has been found south of Hawaii’s Big Island. So too have Magnus’s few skeletal remains, now handed over to the only man who can fit together the pieces of this mystery. But what forensic detective Gideon Oliver discovers could shake the Torkelsson family tree.

Unnatural Selection

The Edgar Award winning author of Where There’s a Will returns with another bonechilling mystery starring ‘Skeleton Detective’ Gideon Oliver. Sue Grafton called Aaron Elkins ‘first rate.’ Elizabeth Peters called him ‘one of the best in the business and getting better all the time.’ And now he’s back in top form. Forensics professor Gideon Oliver accompanies his wife to the Isles of Scilly, which dot the sea like an emerald necklace thirty miles off the Cornwall coast. Julie’s been invited here by Russian expatriate Vasily Kozlov, scientist, millionaire, and eccentric. At his home, Star Castle, he regularly hosts a consortium of guests with differing opinions which makes for some very heated arguments. While Julie’s stuck indoors, Gideon looks forward to puttering around the Neolithic sites nearby. But before day one is through, a newer bone turns up this tibia is only a few years old and all signs point to murder. And just as Gideon and the local law puzzle over the bone’s origin, another murder happens at Star Castle. Could it just be bad luck, two murders within a couple of years? Or do Kozlov’s lively debates have a way of turning deadly?

Little Tiny Teeth

A new mystery to chill the bones from the Edgarr Award winning author of Unnatural Selection. When forensics professor Gideon Oliver joins an Amazon riverboat expedition with a group of research botanists, he expects a nice vacation. What he gets is heat, corrupt officials, dangerous insects and animals and worse.

As they travel upriver, one of the botanists is killed by a deranged passenger who leaps overboard and flees into the darkness. No one can explain why. Theories begin to simmer, and stories of long past, half forgotten grudges and new ones as well boil to the surface.

Only when a fresh skeleton turns up in the river, scoured to the bone by voracious piranhas, does Gideon realize that in this jungle full of predators, humans may be the deadliest of all.

Uneasy Relations

The Edgar Award winning author of Little Tiny Teeth returns with his professor of forensics, Gideon Oliver, a.k.a. the Skeleton Detective.

No one does it better than Aaron Elkins, San Diego Union Tribune and this time, Gideon Oliver will be up on the Rock of Gibraltar, where he ll inspect his oldest bones yet. But a killer’s loose

Around 25,000 years ago, did the Neanderthal live peacefully with his smarter, handsomer cousin, the Ho*mo sapiens? The answer, recently found in the Rock of Gibraltar, left everyone speechless

Buried ceremoniously, high in a cave, lies the skeleton of a human woman, clutching the skeleton of a part human, part Neanderthal child. Fascinated, Professor Oliver jumps at the chance to attend a conference near there. But two deaths, possibly murders, have rocked Gibraltar. As Oliver tries to piece things together, he s about to fall for some deadly tricks. After all, unlike the Gibraltar Boy, he s only human

Skull Duggery

No one solves crimes like Skeleton Detective Gideon Oliver.

Gideon and his wife are on vacation in Mexico when a local police chief requests his assistance on a case. A mummified corpse was discovered in the desert and the coroner believed the victim was shot. But Gideon’s examination reveals the victim was stabbed with a Phillips head screwdriver. Then Gideon is asked to examine the skeleton of a murder victim found a year earlier only to discover another error. The coroner misidentified the remains as belonging to a twelve to fifteen year old girl, when in fact the remains were that of a young woman of twenty.

Gideon knows these two ‘mistakenly’ identified bodies aren’t a coincidence. But finding the connection between them will prove more dangerous than he could possibly imagine and place him into the crosshairs of the killer he’s hunting.

A Deceptive Clarity

Chris Norgren, museum curator and Renaissance art expert, heads to Berlin to assist in mounting a sensational exhibit: The Plundered Past twenty priceless Old Masters looted by the Na*zis, thought for decades to be lost forever, and only recently rediscovered. But things quickly get out of hand when Chris’s patrician, fastidious boss, after smelling a forgery in the lot, turns up dead the very next day on the steps of a dismal Frankfurt brothel, of all places. Now Chris faces two daunting tasks: finding a fake painting among the masterpieces, and a real killer whose sights are now set on him.

A Glancing Light

When a priceless stolen masterpiece is discovered among a shipment of reproductions to a Seattle art musuem, the mild mannered, law abiding curator, Chris Norgren, reluctantly agrees to find out how the painting got there. All too soon, what should have been a pleasant interlude in Italy turns into a bizarre odyssey into shady art world doings and deadly secrets…
.’A remarkable storyteller…
.I look forward to reading more exploits of this appealing sleuth.’MYSTERY NEWS

Old Scores

When a well known French collector donates a Rembrandt to the museum, curator Chris Norgren travels to Europe on a fact finding trip that takes a sinister turn. By the author of A Glancing Light and Make No Bones.

A Wicked Slice

Lee Ofsted just makes the cut for the Pacific Western Woman’s Pro Am golf tournament. She’s never hit the ball better but for some reason, her drives keep slicing. But this isn’t the only mystery soon Lee discovers the body of the tour’s star at the bottom of the course lake. Enter Lieutenant Graham Sheldon. He’s charming, handsome, and determined to capture the killer as well as Lee’s heart. But the murder has triggered buried anger and jealousy among the players, and with a diabolical killer on the loose, Lee finds that making par is the least of her problems

Rotten Lies

The second installment of the best selling series features professional golfer and amateur sleuth Lee Ofsted, who investigates a string of mysterious deaths at a country club in New Mexico, where lightning seems to strike twice.

Nasty Breaks

MysteryLarge Print Edition Agatha & Edgar Award winning Authors A Mystery Guild SelectionKnott presides over this series with loving eye and stinging wit. New York TimesLured by the hefty pay, Lee Ofsted agrees to fill in as a golf pro at a corporate conference on Block Island. But upon her arrival, she finds that putting and chipping quickly give way to kidnapping, ransom and murder. So Lee delves into the history of the company, and, much to her chagrin, discovers that every manager has a motive for murder. Worse yet, now Lee knows too much for the killer to let herlive…

Where Have All the Birdies Gone?

If there is one thing the young golfer Lee Ofsted doesn’t have on her mind, it is her chances of being selected for the Stewart Cup Tournament the competition that pits the greatest American golfers, male and female, against their British and European counterparts. Lee is on no one’s list of the !’greatest American golfers,’ so it comes as a surprise when the great Roger Finley, captain of the American team, invites her to play. She’s on the team, but exhilaration soon gives way to anxiety. Can she deliver? However, as play begins, Lee’s worries about making a fool of herself take second place when Roger!&s devoted long time caddie is found murdered, and Lee herself is the victim of an attempt on her life. It takes all of Lee’s nerve and natural talent to see the competition through, to keep out of the gunsights of a resourceful killer, and, in the end, to make sense of a bizarre and paradoxical mystery.

Loot

April 1945: In the last convulsive days of World War II a convoy of Na*zi trucks loaded with Europe’s greatest art treasures winds its way through the Alps toward a cavernous Austrian salt mine. With the Allies closing in and chaos erupting, a single truck silently disappears into a mountain snowstorm with its cargo of stolen masterpieces. Fifty years later, in a seedy Boston pawnshop, one of the truck’s paintings surfaces at last, pawned for $100 by a smalltime Russian thug. The next day, the shop owner, Simeon Pawlovsky, himself a Na*zi death camp survivor, is dead, the life brutally beaten out of him. The painting is gone. And the chase begins. Ex curator Benjamin Revere, haunted by his failure to save his elderly friend Simeon, is determined to track down the killer by following the missing painting’s trail. But the twisting path is a bewildering and dangerous one that winds through Europe’s major cities…
and back five decades to a time when Hitler’s hated minions looted at will. Soon Ben finds himself caught up in the tangled roots of a conspiracy of greed, lies, hatred, and blood and imperiled by the half century old enigma of the vanished truck and its priceless legacy.

Turncoat

Pete Simon’s all American life was everything he ever wished for: a good home, a satisfying career, and a marriage still strong and loving after nearly twenty years. But in the days following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, everything is about to change. And it begins with the appearance of a stranger at his door. The man ranting madly about money, death, and forgiveness is unknown to Pete but not to his distraught wife, Lily. Only when the man has gone does the truth come out. The unwelcome visitor was Lily ‘s father, whom she had claimed died long ago in their native France. The next day he is dead, his savagely beaten body washed up in a nearby marsh and Lily disappears, leaving a note behind begging Pete not to follow her. As a nation mourns its fallen leader, Pete Simon is devastated by a tragedy of his own. Now, with a business card from an antiques dealer in Barcelona as his only lead, he sets out to find his missing wife, embarking on a twisted and perilous journey that will carry him to Europe, where the hideous crimes of the Na*zi aggressors remain fresh in the minds of those who cannot forget…
or forgive. But each door Pete opens leads him deeper into a painful and shocking past slowly revealing secrets of greed, terror, guilt, and treacherous collaboration with a monstrous enemy that could shatter everything he believes in destroy everything he loves. And suddenly he has become more than a concerned husband and seeker of a bitter truth; he has become the target of desperate, dangerous men and their terrifying vengeance.A haunting parable of good and evil and the many shifting shades of humanity in between, Aaron Elkins’s Turncoat is an extraordinary reading experience, a compelling, provocative, and rocket paced rollercoaster ride with surprises at every turn that will leave the reader breathless.

The Worst Thing

Aaron Elkins has been hailed as ‘a master’ The Dallas Morning News for his Edgarr Award-winning Gideon Oliver mysteries. Now, in an original new novel, he illustrates how quickly everything can go wrong when you ask: What’s the worst that can happen?

For Bryan Bennett, designing hostage negotiation programs is the perfect job-as long as he keeps a safe, theoretical distance. What he can’t do is deal directly with kidnappers or their victims, as a result of his own abduction and imprisonment as a small boy. Thirty-some years later, intense nightmares still plague his sleep, and a fear of enclosed spaces prevents him from attempting to travel.

So when Bryan’s boss asks him to fly to Reykjavik, Iceland, to teach his corporate-level kidnapping and extortion seminar, he automatically says no. But the CEO of GlobalSeas Fisheries, Inc. has specifically requested Bryan-or no one else. Bryan finally relents…

For decades he’s treaded gingerly around the edges of his deepest terrors. Now, on this trip, Bryan’s taken hostage again and must face his fears full-on. Will he realize that in this battle of will and nerve, he is his own greatest enemy? Or has this fight already been lost, years and years ago?

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