The Top End of Australia is
a land teeming with crocodiles, poisonous snakes, and curious Aboriginal myths. It's a strange place to choose to end one's life, but that is what Dinah Pelerin's wealthy American uncle has done. Dying of cancer, he has summoned his entire family -- current wife, ex-wife, assorted children and niece to a comfortless lodge where he intends to rewrite his will and commit suicide with the aid of a rogue Australian physician with whom he shares a mysterious history.
Dinah sees this time with her uncle as a last chance to learn the truth about her father, who died during the commission of a felony when she was a child. But when she arrives, she discovers that the truth has darker ramifications than she'd bargained for. Her artist brother thinks he's possessed by the spirit of a snake god who is moving his hand metaphysically across the canvas; her uncle is obsessed with a woman he married but could never possess; the rest of the family is seething with resentments; and a man none of them claims to know is murdered on a nearby island, impaled on the back of a sea turtle.
A wannabe anthropologist with a passion for mythology, Dinah tries to sort out the complicated song lines of her own ancestors while struggling to solve not one, but two, bizarre murders.
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Bones of Contention
Published by Poisoned Pen Press,
Scottsdale, AZ
Available in:
Hardcover: ISBN 978-1-59058-728-7
Trade Pbk: ISBN 978-1-59058-730-0
Large Type Pbk: ISBN 978-1-59058-730-0
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Available in bookstores on June 1st, 2010
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"Bloody murder in a country house in the Ozzie outback, featuring the most dysfunctional family since Cold Comfort Farm..."
- Dana Stabenow, Edgar-winning author
"Jeanne Matthews� Bones of Contention has it all: clever plotting, corkscrew twists, and lively, entertaining characters. And then there�s the bonus of the Australian locale - and lingo - both of which are laid out for us with verve and wit. What Matthews has done, and done cleverly, is to take that most traditional and charming of murder-mystery settings, the country-house party, fill it with Americans instead of Brits, plop it down in the wilds of Australia�s Northern Territory, and invest the whole thing with an unmistakably modern sensibility. It's a first-rate debut...."
- Aaron Elkins, Edgar-winning author of Old Bones
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