John Clark Wagner

The DNA Murders John Clark Wagner

This mystery is set in 1983, in the mythical river port town of Stanton, Ohio, on the Ohio River. The small, tourist town is situated in close proximity to ancient Indian burial mounds of the Hopewell Culture. The existence of the burial mounds accounts for an Archaeology Department at the otherwise small Stanton College, and is the reason why no one gets terribly excited when kids find an old moldy skull in the woods. But further investigation turns up the complete skeletons of a man with a gash in his forehead, and a small child. Tests reveal that they have been dead for only thirty years. Now a crime scene rather than an archaeology site, Stanton detective Daniel Burke and his assistant Elmo Dempsey, take on the formidable task of identifying the bones and solving the murders. The task is complicated when it is determined that no one is missing or unaccounted for either in the town or the region thereabout for the time period. When all else fails, college scientists working in the emerging science of DNA analysis, are consulted. What is slowly revealed shakes the community and its quaint society to its foundations, and results in a series of murders to conceal crimes of the past, all of which nearly costs Detectives Burke and Dempsey their lives.