The Hanging Tree

Paleontologist Kathryn Widd investigates a set of hominid skull fragments in the Kenyan wilderness and is drawn into the story of a 1908 safari and the British nobleman who died under mysterious circumstances near the site of her dig

Magic and science, past and present, collide in Lambkin's fast-paced thriller, which was a bestseller in South Africa. Kathryn Widd, a paleontologist specializing in violence, goes to Kenya to examine an ancient skull and gets involved in a mystery surrounding a death that occurred on a 1908 expedition, led by John Henry Patterson, to the same locale. From her office in present-day Johannesburg, she recounts the tale of her expedition in a foreboding tone. Accompanied by researcher Ray Chinta, museum administrator Victor Macmillan and his beautiful and enigmatic wife, Marion, Widd makes historic discoveries among the fossils that lend disturbing insight into the origins of human violence. But as the expedition continues, the party begins to relive events that occurred during the ill-fated Patterson expedition. Soon, they find their research straying from the exactitude of science into the realm of magic and mysticism. Looking for metaphysical heft, Lambkin juxtaposes scientific theory with black magic, quantum physics and Bach and uses the metaphor of a fugue to add layers of depth. He falls short of illuminating the implied connections among his many competing themes, and his characterizations rarely rise above stereotype. He does, however, deliver a page-turning puzzler filled with suspense and a richly evoked sense of the African landscape.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The American edition of last year's South African bestseller, a brooding meditation on humankind's violent nature. A peaceful but troubled woman, Kathryn Widd, the junior paleontologist of a South African museum, is sent to the Nyika Desert of Kenya and Somalia by her director. She is to investigate the discovery of an ancient skull while he heads off on a more promising dig. The skull predates other skeletal remains of early humans but, the director figures, belongs to an ape who walked about on all fours, rather than an upright hominid. Turns out he's wrong, and glories accrue to Kathryn, but that's the only triumphant note in this dark novel. Kathryn quickly becomes intrigued by the story of the turn-of-the-century white hunter J.H. Patterson. Patterson either killed or had a hand in the suicide of an English lord after having a steamy affair with his wife, scandalizing colonial Kenya. Patterson's book on the affair, In the Grip of the Nyika, which Kathryn reads with great absorption, turns out to offer a grim foreshadowing of events in the present. Loveless Kathryn unwittingly recapitulates the older story as she falls in love with a latter-day hunter, Tregallion. The tragic violence Patterson found himself drawn into occurs again, leaving Tregallion dead. And this death is in turn mirrored by discoveries at Kathryn's dig, where evidence of a truly ancient murder is unearthed. Kathryn returns to South Africa a mother and an internationally respected scholar, but also a grieving widow, bewildered by the dark, violent nature of humankind and the inscrutability of God. Kathryn is not an entirely convincing character, and the references to the Patterson case seem like overkill, but Lambkin is extremely skilled in evoking the raw malevolence of backcountry Kenya. Heart of Darkness from a woman's point of view. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.