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LITTLE TINY TEETH
by Aaron Elkins
Berkley, June 2007
304 pages
$23.95
ISBN: 042521530X


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

It's 1976 and three Harvard graduate students, two brothers and a friend, are in Peru to harvest the seeds of a disease resistant strain of rubber tree, to sell to a corporation in Kuala Lumpur, and thereby retire their student loans. They get too close to the coca farm of the Chayacuro indians, a tribe of head hunters related to the Jivaro. One of the brothers is hit with a poisoned arrow. The remaining two boys drag him as far as they can, but he dies and they leave him. The other brother is also hit by an arrow, and the third man escapes with the seeds, but not before he shoots one of the Indians.

Thirty years later, in Iowa City, ethnobotanist Professor Arden Scofield, the survivor of that ill-fated journey to the Amazon basin, is preparing a week-long trip up the Amazon to collect specimens. He will be accompanied by another professor from the department, a graduate student, a writer, and an ethnoentomologist from the Department of Agriculture. Also along on the trip will be Gideon Oliver, the 'bone detective', FBI agent John Lau, and Phil Boyajian, who owns a cut-rate travel agency.

All the members of Scofield's party have a grudge against him. He is a self-promoting jerk who rarely keeps his promises but he has developed a persona that makes the public love him. He cuts a deal that will enable the captain of the ship to finish renovating it so he can carry passengers instead of freight. He has hired a guide, Cisco, who is usually strung out on drugs but shows some vestiges of having had a good education. Cisco claims to know all the medicine men along the route they will be traveling and has promised the botanists introductions to them so they can perhaps find some plants that they can sell to the drug companies for further research.

This is the 14th in the Gideon Oliver series but Elkins gives us everyone's history as if it were the first. The story wanders along, just as the Amazon, the slowest-moving river in the world meanders from its source. About three-quarters of the way through the book, Oliver does his act and we stop and gasp in amazement at his expertise. Elkins has many fans, and, although I try one of his books every once in a while, I am not one of them.

Reviewed by Barbara Franchi, May 2007

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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