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Book Reviewed by:Winner of the Danish Crime Novel of the Decade, S.J. Gazan's debut novel The Dinosaur Feather is a classic of Scandinavian noir, from its richly imagined and deeply flawed characters to its scintillating exploration of one of the most fascinating aspects of contemporary dinosaur and avian research.
Biology postgraduate and hopeful PhD Anna Bella Nor is just two weeks away from defending her thesis on the origin of birds when her supervisor, the arrogant and widely despised Dr. Lars Helland, is found dead in his office chair at the University of Copenhagen. In the dead man's bloody lap is a copy of Anna's thesis.
When the autopsy suggests that Helland may have been murdered in a fiendishly ingenious way, the brilliant but tormented young Police Superindendent Søren Marhauge begins the daunting task of unraveling the knotted skeins of interpersonal and intellectual intrigue among the scientists at the university. Unfortunately for him, everyone involved - from embittered single mom Anna Bella Nor to Marhauge's own ex-wife, who is pregnant with her current husband's child - has something to hide, presenting the detective with the greatest professional and personal challenge of his entire career.
It’s a perfect book to get you in the mood for a dark winter. And – a warning for some, a promise for others – it’s filled with revolting descriptions of creatures from biology’s underbelly. Parasitic tapeworms that munch their way through nerves and tissue and lay eggs inside peoples’ intestines, spiders the size of dinner plates, scorpions crawling under bedspreads… it’s all in there...continued
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(Reviewed by Elena Spagnolie).
In S. J. Gazan's The Dinosaur Feather, when Professor Lars Helland, a cantankerous PhD advisor at the Institute of Biology in Copenhagen, is found dead in his office, the police soon discover a copy of PhD student Anna Bella Nor's thesis on his lap…covered in blood. Her controversial paper puts to rest a major scientific debate between Helland and his long-time rival, the hotheaded Dr. Clive Freeman. She dares to prove, once and for all, that birds are, in fact, present-day dinosaurs.
Many Paleo-ornithologists today believe that birds descended from dinosaurs, but deciphering the family tree is (and has been) a very difficult matter. According to award-winning environmental journalist Gareth Huw Davies, "Numerous finds in recent ...
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Dictators ride to and fro on tigers from which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.
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