The Indian Mound Murder - Emerson Littlefield - Bog

The second Midge Sumpter murder mystery! A university paleontology professor is found dead one morning in a partial trench dug into an ancient Indian midden in a remote North Florida woodland. He was not there the previous evening when the site workers checked the trench they'd dug, and no one present at the dig site heard anything that would indicate how the body was transported there. In fact, the dead professor was supposed to be at another site several hundred miles south near Sarasota. Not only has the professor mysteriously appeared in the trench, but his truck, the vehicle he used to work at any site he managed, has disappeared. Midge and her partner, Jake Leon, interview many people, including paleontology students who used to be Army Rangers, a local man who visits the mound to listen to spirits, the head of the department at the professor's university, an aspiring paleontology teacher at the local junior college who wants to enter the high-caliber world of university research, and a student with a dark past as an Army commander in Afghanistan. Midge and Jake follow a trail of mysterious and difficult clues, from tire tracks at a campsite in the woods, to cigarette butts stuck butt downward into the midden, to human bone fragments that aren't supposed to be in a trash midden left by paleo-Indians thousands of years ago, to a surprising and action-packed conclusion.