Local author will sign copies of “Dead Whales Tell No Tales” at OSU
By Staff / Corvallis Gazette Times, April 11, 2003
The OSU Bookstore will be hosting a booksigning for local author Ron Lovell at noon Thursday in Memorial Union room 206.
Whales and politics of whaling are both characters and a key plot point in "Dead Whales Tell No Tales," the second mystery in Lovell's Thomas Martindale Series.
Martindale, the protagonist Publisher's Weekly called "sardonic," is teaching a seminar at the university marine center on the Oregon Coast when a marine biologist is found dead. His former girlfriend is accused of the murder and Tom sets out to clear her name. To him, there are many more logical suspects, all of them attending a whaling conference at the center: the Japanese fisheries minister, an Eskimo whaling commissioner, and several militant conservationists.
Soon, Tom's investigation uncovers the murdered man's involvement in a graduate student's drowning at sea and his collaboration with the Japanese to alter whaling population statistics.
It also puts him in danger from unknown pursuers who hit him over the head and chase him into a remote part of Oregon's rugged Coast Range. At the same time, a large gray whale has beached herself near his house, adding yet another twist to this perplexing mystery.
Booklist called Lovell's first novel, Murder at Yaquina Head, a "convincing story peppered with absorbing details of World War II."
The book was published by Sunstone in 2003.
For more information on this event or to reserve a signed copy of the book, call 541-737-1505.