Harry Przewalski

Created by Leonard Krishtalka

Now here’s a switch.

HARRY PRZEWALSKI wasn’t a cop before he became a Pittsburgh private eye. He wasn’t a soldier or a lawyer or an insurance investigator, or any of the other popular former occupations that have crowded the genre to overflowing.

Nope. Harry was a paleontologist.

Can you dig it?

And somehow, conveniently all his cases seem to involve his former job. In his first case, The Bone Field (2019), he’s on the trail of a world-famous museum paleontologist, Peter Marchand, who seems to have taken a powder right in the middle leading a major dinosaur dig in the badlands of Wyoming.

In the second novel, Death Spoke (also 2019), Harry’s poking into the murder of another big shot in the field, Joyce Fulbright, the University of Kansas’ Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and a renowned archaeologist and expert on prehistoric cave art. Before he’s through, Harry will have to plow through a field of World War II atrocities,  , religious blasphemy, sexual deceit, and archaeological fraud. 

In his third romp, he’s at it again. In The Camel Driver (2020), he’s hired to investigate the gruesome hisotry of a 140-year-old museum diorama, recently vandalized, which has revealed the gruesome partial remains of a dead child. Harry is hired to investigate the macabre history of the exhibit.

It’s certainly a far cry from the typical mean streets scenario, but fortunately Harry’s not just well-educated up the wazoo–he’s also one unexpectedly tough cookie, street-smart and more than willing to take on danger from wherever it comes from, a dark alley in the mean streets, some remote archeological dig where human remains–recent or ancient–threaten to yield their secrets, or, perhaps most frightening of all, an academic faculty meeting.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

As a paleontologist, Leonard Krishtalka has worked throughout the fossil-rich badlands of the American West, Canada, Patagonia, China, the Afar region of Ethiopia, and the Turkana region of Kenya. Besides the Harry Przewalski series, he’s the author of award-winning essays, the acclaimed Dinosaur Plots, and The Body on the Bed, an upcoming historical murder mystery.

UNDER OATH

  • “A fiercely intelligent crime drama as emotionally sharp as it is historically inventive. Krishtalka’s prose is powerfully versatile, alternating between the sort of terse, unsentimental phrasing that one would expect from a detective story and poetical elegance.”
    — Kirkus Reviews

NOVELS

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.

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