DINOIR

Dr. Ridge Veros reads the dead for a living. A cladist who can look at bone and tell you what a thing truly was - not what it called itself - she has spent her life certain that the categories everyone trusts are lies waiting to be caught. Then her twin brother vanishes, leaving a trail of letters encoded in three grammars only three people alive can read, and the certainty she was engaged to marry into becomes the thing most likely to get her killed.

Thorne Walker is eighty years old and has never learned how to die. A triceratops detective who works out of a walk-up in a city where Saurians and humans share the rain, he takes Ridge's case because the alternative is thinking about his own missing past - and because something about her technical, armored precision reads, to him, like a held breath.

What they uncover is not a disappearance but a design: a mortality nobody questions, a fortune built on a lie about what a body is for, and a man whose courtesy is only the shape drawn around a corpse. To find her brother, Ridge will have to walk knowingly into the trap he set for her - and prove that the most dangerous thing in any room is a woman who refuses to be read.

A hardboiled neo-noir mystery for the biologically literate, DINOIR is a classic with claws: a story about extinction, inheritance, love with no utility, and the difference between the name a thing is given and the true thing underneath.