The Ancient Dead
It’s a hot August in the southern Alberta badlands. Amanda Doucette and her policeman boyfriend Chris Tymko are driving along country roads on their way to Drumheller, where Amanda will be meeting with staff at the Royal Tyrell dinosaur museum. She’s organizing a prairie adventure tour, with trail riding and fossil prospecting, for students from northern Alberta.
A photographer working on a photo book about the area stumbles on an intriguing bone protruding from the ground in a shaded coulee. At first he thinks it might be a dinosaur bone, but it turns out to be a human femur, and far more recent. A young journalist scoops the story and splashes it across the local press.
Amanda sees a weathered farmhouse that reminds her of a photo on her aunt’s wall—and a call to her aunt reveals a family secret: an uncle Amanda only dimly remembers, who was last seen in this part of Alberta but hasn’t been heard from in decades. Amanda decides to look for him, fitting in the search around her tour-planning work.
This is the fourth in a series with thirty-something Doucette, a former international aid worker who’s recovering from traumatic experiences overseas. Each of the books has been set in a different part of Canada, and this one takes full advantage of the starkly unusual landscape in the dinosaur-bone fields east of Calgary. The title, The Ancient Dead, is taken from a poem by an early twentieth-century paleontologist and fossil hunter, Charles Sternberg. Here it refers not just to fossils but to others who are dead or at least long gone.
But the past refuses to stay buried. Passions in the present result in dangerous confrontations for Amanda and others, keeping up the tension right to the end.
Barbara Fradkin grew up in Montreal. She completed a BA at McGill University, attended the University of Toronto for her MA, then married and moved to Ottawa to work and raise a family. She completed a Ph.D. in clinical psychology at the University of Ottawa, and worked with children and families for twenty-five years as a child psychologist.
In 2000, she published her first novel, Do or Die, introducing Inspector Michael Green in a police procedural series set in Ottawa. By 2014 she had written ten Inspector Green novels. Two of them won the Best Novel award from the Crime Writers of Canada: Fifth Son (2005) and Honour Among Men (2007). Fans of Inspector Green will be glad to hear that there is an eleventh in the series—The Devil to Pay—due to be published later in 2021.
In between, Fradkin launched two additional crime series: in 2011 she began a series of easy-read novellas featuring Cedric O’Toole, a country farmer/handyman, and in 2016 she published the first in the Amanda Doucette series., now up to four with The Ancient Dead. She has also written a number of short stories.
Doucette lives in Ottawa. She is Past President of Crime Writers of Canada, and is also a member of Sisters in Crime and Capital Crime Writers. Her late husband was a war crimes prosecutor with the federal Justice Department.
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