"Early one morning, Congressman Alexander Paine Wilson is planning his reelection campaign when a mysterious delivery arrives at his townhouse. Inside is a gigantic taxidermied aardvark. What does it mean? The story hurtles between present day Washington, DC, where Wilson tries to get rid of the unsightly beast before it destroys his career, and Victorian England, where readers meet the aardvark's taxidermist and the naturalist who hunted her, and...

At the center of this story of majesty and high mountain magic are three Magdalenas-Mary, a woman whose uncertain journey opens the book; Magdalena Mountain, shrouded in mystery and menace; and the all-black Magdalena alpine butterfly, the most elusive of several rare and beautiful species found on the mountain. And high in the Colorado Rocky Mountain wilderness, sharing the remote territory of the Erebia magdalena butterfly, lives the enigmatic...

"When Duncan McCallum is asked by Benjamin Franklin to retrieve an astonishing cache of fossils from the Kentucky wilderness, his excitement as a naturalist blinds him to his treacherous path. But as murderers stalk him Duncan discovers that the fossils of this American incognitum are not nearly as mysterious as the political intrigue driving his mission. The Sons of Liberty insist, without explaining why, that the only way to keep the king from pursuing...