The Paleontologist

Dr. Simon Nealy has spent his life haunted by the day his six-year-old sister, Morgan, was abducted from the Hawthorne Museum of Natural History while he was supposed to be watching her. Now a curator of paleontology, reeling from a breakup and the death of the aunt who raised him, he takes a job back at that same crumbling, pandemic-shuttered museum, drawn to the place where Morgan vanished.

Alone in the failing Hawthorne, Simon starts to see and hear the impossible: strange animal sounds, bloody footprints, a prehistoric shape moving in the dark. Turning to the handwritten diaries of his predecessor, Dr. Albert J. Mueller, he uncovers a blood-soaked mystery reaching back 150 million years—and toward the truth about his sister. Luke Dumas's The Paleontologist is a gothic ghost story and dinosaur horror braided through with grief and guilt.