Sleeping Bones

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Lambda Award-winner Forrest seems to have lost some of her luster in her latest Kate Delafield mystery (after 1997's Apparition Alley). The usually cool Delafield, an LAPD detective, is unnerved when she and her new partner, rookie Joe Cameron, are called in to examine the body of well-known anthropologist Herman Layton, who has turned up dead at the famous La Brea Tar Pits with a puncture wound near his kidney. When Delafield and Cameron notify the victim's next of kin, they find out that Layton's daughter, Peri, is herself a world-renowned paleoanthropologist, whose career promises to surpass that of her mentors--the infamous Leakey family. The case takes an unusual turn after the discovery of a jawbone that resembles that of the two-million-year-old Peking Man, whose remains were lost nearly 30 years ago. Later, Delafield and Cameron learn of Herman Layton's involvement in the U.S. government's covert attempt to move the Peking Man from China for safekeeping after the Japanese invasion of WWII, an episode that left the adventurous anthropologist ostracized by his colleagues. The link between Peking Man and Layton's murder seems ironclad after CIA agent Nicholas Whitby appears and begins meddling in the case. Meanwhile, Delafield grapples with a shocking family secret revealed by her Aunt Agnes. Though the book has many action-packed scenes, Forrest fails to convincingly develop her various story lines, and several of the climaxes are far-fetched. Delafield remains an engaging protagonist, but the novel's turbulent events leave her, surprisingly, unchanged. Agent, Charlotte Sheedy. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Los Angeles homicide detective Kate Delafield's latest adventure takes her to the famous La Brea tar pits, where she breaks in new partner Joe on a bizarre case of murder. An excellent novel by a two-time winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Best Mystery. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

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.