Sarah Andrews

Assigned to assist the Salt Lake City police in the investigation of the murder of Afton McWain, a controversial colleague whose body turns up in a gravel quarry, forensic geologist Em Hansen confronts the results of the victim's turbulent personal life.

Lady geologist Em Hansen is hired by an oil millionaire to find the killer of his wife. The investigation plays out against the background of oil drilling and flying, Em being a pilot.

This author's latest creation sends Em Hansen to Florida, where she investigates a strange dust cloud supposedly arriving from Africa. Before it's all over, NASA, the FBI, and her new boyfriend are involved.

Against her better judgment, Em - broke, unemployed, and desperate for something to take her mind off her father's recent death - accepts this less-than-ideal job: A U.S. senator sends her to Santa Rosa, California, to investigate his daughter Janet's death. He thinks something Janet uncovered at her job as a geologist for an environmental consulting firm got her killed, and he wants Em to find out what it was. What at first seems like a straightforward...

Em Hansen works as a mudlogger among a mostly coarse crew of working men. Though she suffers the ill will of the majority, Em is doggedly attached to her work, which involves recording data about mud samples, even as the arrival of a coolly elegant woman geologist increases the sexism quotient. The first death claims Em's mentor Bill, a careful man whose car skids out of control; next to go is young Willie, apparently crushed to death by wild horses....