There's a Neanderthal in my bed
Like most women on their wedding night, Gloria Kryptopoulos comes to this routine, non-startling conclusion. But Gloria is not most women. She has a PhD in Anthropology, and her husband, a senile buffalo farmer, doubles as research specimen. Where the average susceptible young bride is filled with a kind of shrinking horror, this moment of epiphany affects Gloria the way an overflowing bathtub had a compatriot of hers, several centuries ago - a gent by the name of Aristotle. Like him, she springs up, uttering something unintelligible in Greek, and spends the next twenty years of her life trying to prove her hubby is the last surviving Homo Neanderthalensis, a leftover from a lost tribe of Neanderthals.
Flash-forward several years. Gloria is about to make public her epoch-making findings at an international anthropological conference, when her research specimen-husband is kidnapped - by a jealous colleague with a permanently jaundiced view of life after having been dropped on his head as a baby.
Enter the Perl and Hari: software programmers, restaurateurs, scientific detectives. Gloria is impressed with their tracking down of a kidnapped buffalo. She hires them to track down her kidnapped buffalo-farmer husband.
Their search takes them to the glassy caverns of AARS, lined with bound back-volumes of Playboy, in the staid business districts of Singapore. As head of a premier anthropological research organization, Shi Yi must know something of the kidnap, for he has a finger in every anthropological pie. But is he really on their side? Or is he hand-in-buffalo poop with the kidnapper? It does not take them long to realize that they have not one, but three mad anthropologists to contend with, and that the answers lie deep in the virgin rainforests of Borneo.
And what do leading critics think of Neanderthal?
Telangana Herald: We're really, absolutely sure it's a book of some sort...
Farm & Ag Review: The author displays a remarkable breadth of expertise in livestock farming, turning this time to the care and upkeep of Neanderthals, which we have been given to understand is a prehistoric breed of milch cattle.
Daily BJ: OK - archaeological sex. Now we're getting somewhere. This fellow finally seems to be learning that sex is what our readers want to read.
This is what the critics say about Neanderthal. And do you know what we say about critics? Read the book, kids. The last one to read it is a mad anthropologist.