Overview
Ansel Phoenix makes her living drawing dinosaurs for magazines, books, and museum displays. One morning, digging with students out in the field, she unearths the body of colleague and ex-lover Nick Capos. Shocked and grieved over the murder, Ansel is also distraught on a professional level. As president of the Pangaea Society, an esteemed paleontology organization to which the murdered botanist also belonged, Ansel must fight to preserve the society's reputation when unsavory facts about its scientists—dead and alive—are revealed.
Not trusting the Big Toe police who've an axe to grind with her father, Ansel decides to investigate what Capos had been doing during the last few months of his life and soon suspects he was working on a secret project worth killing for. Her list of possible suspects grows by the hour as someone starts stalking her across the Montana landscape. This master predator will stop at nothing to keep her from discovering...what? Why is Nick's fossil collection missing and why had he developed a recent interest in Baltic amber?
Ansel must also deal with the cultural challenges of her own half-Anglo, half-Blackfoot heritage, her ranching family, and the changes threatening their rural community while using her intuitive fossil-sleuthing skills to solve more than one Mesozoic mystery.