Leonard Krishtalka enjoys two careers--one as novelist, essayist, and author, the other as paleontologist, museum director and evolutionary biologist. As a novelist, he uses the mystery genre to excavate the human condition. His award-winning series of Harry Przewalski novels, The Bone Field, Death Spoke, The Camel Driver, and Native Blood, are detective thrillers, each a human intrigue wrapped inside an anthropological intrigue. Each unravels the dirty underbelly of people's lives--the love, loss, betrayal, treachery, fraud, and murder buried beneath petrified shards, skin and bones.Krishtalka has authored two historical fiction novels, The Body on the Bed, and its sequel, The Body on the Bricks. Both feature crime reporter Mary Fanning, who investigates shocking murders and covers the sensational trials, all amid the social upheaval of 1870s post-Civil War Kansas.Krishtalka has also written a regular column for the Lawrence Journal-World and for Carnegie Magazine, with an acclaimed book of collected natural history essays, Dinosaur Plots.As a paleontologist, Krishtalka has worked on fossil-hunting expeditions throughout western Canada and the US, Patagonia, Europe, China, Kenya and Ethiopia, unearthing and studying the remains of past life and cultures of the planet, including dinosaurs, ancient mammals, and hominids--human ancestors. He has held academic posts at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh, PA, the University of Pittsburgh, the National Science Foundation, Washington, DC, and The University of Kansas, Lawrence.Krishtalka lives in Lawrence, the central setting for two Przewalski novels, Death Spoke and its sequel, Native Blood, and for both Mary Fanning novels, The Body on the Bed and The Body on Bricks.