Category: Mystery
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
ISBN-13: 9780425222508
Series: Gideon Oliver, #14
Pub. Date: July 2008 (reprint)
Date Read: April 2009
"The Chayacuro had followed at a hundred feet, slipping silently through the undergrowth and hanging vines like the jaguars they revered. They watched as the strangers entered the coca garden. With only a look between them and a barely perceptible dip of the chin from Jabuti-toro, each man pulled from his quiver a dart dipped in poison before they had left the village."
Forensic anthropologist Gideon Oliver, the Skeleton Detective, has decided to tag along on an Amazon riverboat with his friend John Lau and a group of botanists. Their mutual friend Phil, who runs On the Cheap tours, has assured them this will be a relaxing and fun way to see the majesty of the Amazon but their excursion will be filled with heat, poisonous spiders, drugs and even murder.
The story opens with a scene from thirty years before when three promising Harvard graduate students in ethnobotany had only spent a few days in the Amazon before meeting with some fateful consequences. Now one of them, Arden Scofield, is a professor at Iowa University and is going to be leading an expedition down to the Amazon.
Along for trip are several people who all seem to have a bit of a grudge against Arden. There's Tim, a student of Arden's, Maggie another professor at IU, Mel, the ghostwriter Arden has collaborated with on books and Duayne a fellow scientist. The professor is not a likeable person and to top it off he's got more than research on his mind on this trip. He is hoping to make a bit of money on the side by transporting drugs.
Just like the slow ride along the Amazon, the story unfolds bit by bit until Arden and the tour guide go missing and someone claims to have been attacked.
The author sets up a captivating scene with his descriptions of the jungle, the river and the plant life. There is tension right from the prologue to the subsequent chapters where each character is intoduced and a motive easily assigned to any of them but what I found a bit bland was the main character as well as how the murder and resolution is played out.