Nick

By all appearances, the town of Norick is perfect. Secluded amid a vast stretch of untamed wilderness, the settlement and her people are alone. Here, a thousand leagues into the North, the settlers have forged their own path. Here, in their isolation, the settlers have flourished. But in this idyllic mountain community, not everything is as it first seems. For William Breeve, the drunk, damaged captain of the Town Guard, Norick’s 100th anniversary celebration unfolds in a series of strange, disconcerting events. Events that make clear there’s more at work in these woods.

The year is 1876. Warring Indian tribes still populate America's western territories, even as lawless gold-rush towns begin to mark the landscape. In much of the country, it is still illegal to espouse evolution. Against this backdrop two monomaniacal paleontologists pillage the Wild West, hunting for dinosaur fossils while surveilling, deceiving, and sabotaging each other in a rivalry that will come to be known as the Bone Wars.

The United States government is given a warning by the preeminent biophysicists in the country: current sterilization procedures applied to returning space probes may be inadequate to guarantee uncontaminated re-entry to the atmosphere.