Dead Man's Bones.

Dead Man's Bones

Susan Wittig Albert 

Berkley

ISBN 0425200175 $23.95, 336 pp.

With revenues down at China Bayle's Thyme and Season Herb Shop, Ruby Wilcox's Crystal Cave New Age Store and their joint venture, The Thyme for Tea restaurant, both women are taking on additional jobs. Ruby has started the Party Thyme Catering Service and China is doing more customized garden planning to make ends meet. China also has to balance her personal life which includes a husband, her stepson Brian and assorted pets. In a cave Brian finds the skulls of two humans, who lived there over ten thousand years ago; the university sponsoring the dig is ecstatic. They are not so happy when Brian finds the body of a man that was murdered in the same location about a quarter of a century ago. The cold case heats up when the town's leading citizen Jane Oberman kills Hank Dixon in self-defense. Hank's father worked for the family for years. The sister state he broke into their home with a knife in his hand. China believes that killing and the discovery of the twenty-five year old skeleton are linked and plans to find what the two cases have in common. Susan Wittig Albert has written an entertaining and diabolically clever amateur sleuth mystery focusing on a heroine who can't keep away from on ongoing investigation. She is endearing loyal and smart enough to figure out the identity of the victim in the cave. Together with Ruby, there two women make Batman and Robin look like amateurs.