His mentor dead, an archaeologist returns to the mysterious YucatánA novice archaeologist, Clay Holliman came to the Yucatán Peninsula in search of the secrets of the Maya. Taken in by the family of Doctor Leon, an expert on the local excavations, Clay discovered a world where the mysteries were not fully buried—where even the city was a jungle. Ten years later, his career is in a tailspin, Doctor Leon is dead, and the Yucatán is calling him home.Although he tells the man at customs that he has not come to dig, it will not be long before Holliman is lured back into the jungle. He goes to the infamous site at Chan Chen that has already claimed the reputations and lives of several brilliant archaeologists, and which Holliman must conquer if he is to unearth the truth about the jungle—and himself.

In a decaying plantation graveyard, Alan Graham finds a clue to a great American mysteryThe headstone reads Louis, and when Pepper Courtney finds it, she assumes it belonged to a slave. But when the old woman who owns the crumbling plantation house gives her an ancestor's diary, Courtney discovers that Louis was a white man whose drifter's appearance concealed a gentleman's manners. Who was this stranger, and why did he die with the president's name on his lips? Courtney's boss, contract archaeologist Alan Graham, has a radical theory—and there are those who would kill to keep it quiet. Based on the diary, the dig, and the scant historical records, Graham believes the headstone may have belonged to explorer Meriwether Lewis, who was said to have died in Tennessee but may have survived to make a new life in Louisiana. To solve this centuries-old mystery, he will have to catch a modern-day killer.

Micah Dunn investigates a murderous plot to discredit an archaeologist In steamy downtown New Orleans, Gregory Thorpe is presenting an exhibition that could rewrite the history of the ancient Mayans. But when fake artifacts begin appearing alongside the authentic ones, Thorpe's reputation is thrown into jeopardy. To trace the fraud, Thorpe hires Micah Dunn, a world-weary private detective whose tour in Vietnam cost him the use of one of his arms and provided fodder for decades of nightmares. PI work is boring, repetitive, and safe, but clearing Thorpe's name will expose Dunn to the kind of danger he thought he left behind in the jungle. Dunn has experience working with archaeology, and he knows the field is cutthroat. Thorpe is not well liked on the Tulane campus, and any of his colleagues or grad students could be responsible for the fraud. When one of the suspects turns up dead, Dunn realizes that someone in New Orleans will kill to keep the Mayan past...