Old Bones
by Aaron Elkins
Summary
The tide at Mont St Michel comes in, the guidebooks say, at the speed of a galloping horse, and in the novel's opening it catches Guillaume du Rocher, Resistance hero and iron patriarch of a Breton dynasty, walking the sands he has known all his life: an accident, apparently, of a man who never had accidents. The family assembles at the manor for the will, and the reading detonates politely; then workmen lifting the cellar floor find the skeleton, and the du Rochers acquire a second, older corpse to explain.
Enter Gideon Oliver, the Skeleton Detective, an American forensic anthropologist lecturing nearby, who reads bones the way graphologists read letters, and whose examination of the cellar remains, age, build, the healed fractures and the unhealed ones, begins dismantling forty years of family history. The buried man dates to the Occupation, when the manor hosted both German officers and Resistance secrets, when Guillaume's brother Alain died at collaborators' hands, and when somebody's version of events became the official one because everyone else involved was dead. Elkins runs the investigation as a double excavation, Gideon's osteology in the present, the Occupation's moral sediment underneath, with murders resuming among the heirs as the past gets too near the surface, and the solution rearranges the war story the family has lived on, hero and traitor trading skeletons.
Light on gore, generous with Normandy meals, and genuinely instructive about what bone tells.
Around two hundred pages.
Best for readers who want the forensic mystery in its charming, pre laboratory era form, science serving an old fashioned family puzzle with real war guilt in the mortar.
Historical Context & Significance
Old Bones won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1988 and fixed the Gideon Oliver series, then four books old, as the genre's forensic anthropology franchise: Elkins's Skeleton Detective predates the television forensics boom, and ABC gave him his own series in 1989, played by Louis Gossett Jr., years before the forensic procedurals arrived.
Aaron Elkins, a former anthropology instructor whose academic couple, he and his co writing wife Charlotte, also produced golf mysteries, kept Gideon digging across fourteen further volumes and four decades, the professor's globetrotting cases making the series a byword for the cozy learned mystery, murder plus a free education per volume.
The Occupation material gave this entry its unusual weight, French wartime memory handled with more seriousness than the form usually attempts, and the Edgar registered the elevation; the series never chased that darkness again, which its readers count as part of the charm.