Science most foul

Natural History, July-August, 2006 by Laurence A. Marshall

Summertime, and the reading is easy. You don't escape to the beach or the mountains to fritter away your lazy hours fretting about the pollution of the Arctic or the effects of invasive species on Hawaiian biodiversity. No, what you want is a healthy homicide. It's best if the crime is outrageous, the suspects menacing, and the investigator both noble and quirky. Still, there's no reason not to mix in a little science with the mayhem. After all, wasn't Sherlock Holmes a master chemist, and Watson a trained physician?

Everyone has perennial choices, I'm sure. High on my list would be almost any novel by Nevada Barr, whose crime-stopping park ranger Anna Pigeon seems to have worked at most of the great scenic wonders of North America. Less well known, but equally entertaining, is Morgan O'Brien, the creation of the Canadian novelist Alex Brett. O'Brien may be one of the few detectives whose specialty is scientific-research fraud, and her latest adventure, Cold Dark Matter (2005), authentically set in a large mountaintop observatory, involves murder, mayhem, and, not incidentally, spectroscopy of distant galaxies.

Thankfully, there seems to be no shortage of writers who can artfully blend mystery and science. Among the most enjoyable new publications that have graced my nightstand in recent months are these prime candidates for summer fun:

Unnatural Selection by Aaron Elkins (Berkley Books; $23.95)

Gideon Oliver, forensic anthropologist extraordinaire, makes his thirteenth appearance in this latest novel by Edgar Award-winner Aaron Elkins. The setting is pure Agatha Christie: a brooding castle in the Isles of Scilly, off the Cornish coast of England, where a small group of environmental experts--including Gideon's spouse, Julie, an expert on wildfire management--have assembled for a weeklong brainstorming session hosted by an eccentric Russian entrepreneur. While Julie deals with the inflammable mix of personalities at the daily colloquia, Gideon kills time examining artifacts at the local museum. Mixed in with the museum's prehistoric skeletal remains, he discovers, is a human bone that, to his trained eye, shows signs of murder most foul. Soon more bones show up on a local beach, and it becomes clear that they all belong to the victim of a brutal dismemberment that took place a bit more recently than the Bronze Age. There is no record, however, of any local person gone missing. So whose bones are they?

As Gideon ponders the evidence and the local police chief investigates, the fog rolls in and the fog rolls out. Tempers flare and passions simmer among the invitees at the castle. Then, one mistshrouded midnight, a participant in the workshop is forcibly precipitated from a parapet. Could there be a connection between this murder and the dismembered bones? Well, of course there is, but you must resist the temptation to leapfrog to the obligatory scene in which all the assembled suspects find out which of them is guilty. The pleasure of summer readinglies not in resolution but in investigation, and Elkins keeps things moving with plenty of local atmosphere, compelling characterization, and a refreshingly low level of violence. CSI: Miami it's not, but it would make a lovely episode on the BBC Mystery Monday series.

The Darwin Conspiracy by John Darnton (Alfred A. Knopf: $24.95)

After five vigorous years aboard the H.M.S. Beagle, Charles Darwin returned to England a broken man. His mind was sharper than ever, to be sure, and many decades of groundbreaking research and writing lay ahead, but his body was already beginning to fail. For the rest of his life he complained of nausea, vomiting, flatulence, skin rashes, headaches, vertigo, and countless other maladies. For all of them he sought remedies that, given the primitive state of medicine at the time, may have done him more harm than good. At various times Darwin dosed himself with opium, shocked himself with electricity, and wrapped his body with towels soaked in freezing water--all to no avail.

Darwin's illness is a real historical mystery: How could a young man who galloped on horseback over the Pampas and backpacked (sans Gore-Tex) in the Andes, turn so prematurely into an elderly invalid, obsessed with rampant bodily dysfunctions?

To the shelf of scholarly monographs addressing this question, vacation readers should welcome The Darwin Conspiracy, a fast-paced novel of romance and intellectual intrigue by John Darnton, who was editor and foreign correspondent for The New York Times. Its protagonists are Hugh Kellem, an anthropologist, and Beth Dulcimer, an evolutionary biologist, whose pursuit of the Darwinian lore--and of each other--begins on a remote island of the Galapagos, amidst the finches that helped inspire the theory of natural selection.

The two return to England and become fascinated with the hidden threads of Darwin's life, aided by the fortuitous discovery of a series of journals written by Darwin's daughter Lizzie. There are a few side plots, and numerous flashbacks re-creating Darwin's travels on the Beagle, but most of the detective work here is of the academic sort, carried out in dimly-lit archives, vaguely suggestive of The Da Vinci Code, but nowhere near as ominous.