Sara E. Johnson

Is the past better left undisturbed, or unearthed? When a body is found half-submerged in a molten mud pot in one of Rotorua's famous geothermal wonderlands, forensics expert Alexa Glock spots a way to prolong her stay in New Zealand, which she has been visiting for work. Teeth are her expertise, and the investigation needs her help, as other ways of identifying the body may have... melted away. Joining Detective Inspector Bruce Horne and his team, Alexa discovers that the murder victim, a city councilman, had trespassed on an island sacred to the Maori. The ancient punishment for such a transgression is disaster, demonic possession, or death... and when she visits the island to investigate, the same outcome is promised for her. Alexa doesn't believe in ancient spirits returning to exact revenge, and when another victim turns up dead she begins to wonder whether the real threat is something--or someone--much closer to home.

Molten Mud Murder

Hungry Bones

A nature trek turns dangerous when the wilderness gives up its bones... New Zealand's remote Milford Track seems the perfect place for forensic investigator Alexa Glock to reconnect with her brother Charlie, with whom she hasn't spent much time since they were kids. Their backpacking trip seems ill-fated from the start, though, when she must stop on the way to examine nine skeletons—most likely M?ori tribespeople—whose graves have been unearthed by highway construction. Before she opens the first casket, a M?ori elder gives her a dire warning: "The viewing of bones can unleash misfortune to the living. Or worse." Though Alexa dismisses his words as superstitious, they soon come back to haunt her as the idyllic hike takes a sinister turn. First, Charlie is aloof and resentful of the time Alexa has spent at work. Then a rock avalanche nearly carries her away as it reveals the skeletal remains of someone who has clearly been stabbed to death. When a fellow hiker goes missing and is later found dead, Alexa has all she can do to focus on the science as she investigates two murders, while trying not to become the third victim.

The Bone Track

Lips may lie, but teeth never do At first, Alexa Glock's initial case as a traveling forensic investigator seems straightforward—her expertise in teeth helps her identify the skeletal remains of a hunter found on the remote Stewart Island in New Zealand. But when she realizes the bullet lodged in his skull was not self-inflicted, and then a second, shark-ravaged body washes up on Ringaringa Beach, it's clear that something dangerous is lurking in the beautiful waters surrounding the island. The disturbing sight seems to confirm what locals have hashed out in the pub: shark cage-diving, lucrative for owners and popular with tourists, has changed the great white sharks' behavior, turning them into man-eaters. Tensions between cagers and locals mount as Alexa dives into the harrowing case. While measuring bite patterns, she makes a shocking discovery that just might lead her to who—or what—is behind both deaths.

The Bones Remember

The Fear of French Negroes is an interdisciplinary study that explores how people of African descent responded to the collapse and reconsolidation of colonial life in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1845). Using visual culture, popular music and dance, periodical literature, historical memoirs, and state papers, Sara E. Johnson examines the migration of people, ideas, and practices across imperial boundaries. Building on previous scholarship on black internationalism, she traces expressions of both aesthetic and experiential transcolonial black politics across the Caribbean world, including Hispaniola, Louisiana and the Gulf South, Jamaica, and Cuba. Johnson examines the lives and work of figures as diverse as armed black soldiers and privateers, female performers, and newspaper editors to argue for the existence of "competing inter-Americanisms" as she uncovers the struggle for unity amidst the realities of class, territorial, and linguistic diversity. These stories move beyond a consideration of the well-documented anxiety insurgent blacks occasioned in slaveholding systems to refocus attention on the wide variety of strategic alliances they generated in their quests for freedom, equality and profit.

Sara E. Johnson

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