Poor Kate Delafield of the LAPD! An ex-marine, she has an upright, uptight, black-and-white code of honor. Yet here she is, risking her love relationship and her career as passion sweeps her into a female murder suspect's arms and she deceives her new partner on the job, denies her lover's existence to a newfound brother, betrays her oath as a police officer, and aids and abets a CIA cover-up of an affair spanning decades and continents. And all that on one case involving the stabbing death of an elderly man and the mysterious reappearance of the possibly genuine remains of an important anthropological find, Peking man. Forrest swiftly paces this mystery-within-a-mystery, which is welcome after the somewhat lead-footed Apparition Alley (1997) and Liberty Square (1996). She leaves some threads purposely untied, including those of an old murder case whose future in the courts looks uncertain and of that previously unknown brother. Fans will eagerly await their tying, perhaps in Kate's next caper. Whitney Scott
From 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 copyand 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 lifeKate 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. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
About the Author
Katherine V. Forrest, two-time winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Best Mystery, is the author of Curious Wine, one of the bestselling lesbian novels of all time; Liberty Square, also nominated for a Lambda Award; and a number of other acclaimed works of fiction. Her novel Murder at the Nightwood Bar is a forthcoming film by director Tim Hunter (River's Edge).
