The Fossil Hunter

Wollombi, The Hunter Valley, 1847. The last thing Mellie Vale remembers before the fever takes her is running through the bush as a monster chases her--but no one believes her story. In a bid to curb Mellie's overactive imagination, her benefactors send her to visit a family friend, Anthea Winstanley. Anthea is an amateur paleontologist with a dream. She is convinced she will one day find proof the great sea dragons--the ichthyosaur and the plesiosaur--swam in the vast inland sea that millions of years ago covered her property, and soon Mellie shares that dream since she loves fossil hunting too.

1919. When Penelope Jane Martindale arrives home from the battlefields of World War I with the intention of making peace with her father and commemorating the death of her two younger brothers in the trenches, her reception is not as she had hoped. Looking for distraction, she finds a connection between a fossil at London's Natural History Museum and her brothers that leads her to an area where they loved to camp. But the gorge has a sinister reputation--seventy years ago, several women disappeared from there. So when P. J. uncovers some unexpected remains, it seems as if the past is reaching into the present. She's determined to find answers about what happened all those years ago . . . and perhaps also some closure to the loss of her brothers.