The Bone Wars is an exciting story of physical adventure set in the Old West, a time and frontier that fascinates not only Americans but people around the world. Beyond this, the story engages the mind with a hunt, not for gold, but for another kind of treasure—knowledge of the past, of strange and exotic worlds as real as our own, but almost unimaginably remote in time.

It engages the heart with finelydrawn characters that challenge stereotypes instead of relying on them. The cowboys are not automatically the good guys and the Indians on the warpath are not inevitably the bad guys.

Further, the novel portrays a spiritual confrontation between the sacred and the profane. The Black Hills are holy lands to the Native American, and the quest of the bone men for knowledge for its own sake is also pure. To use these...