** spoiler alert ** I don't want to give away who dunnit.
This book made me want to get a little hammer and go out looking for fossils. Okay, I've always sort of wanted to do that, but this intensified that feeling! Fortey might try just a bit too hard to be humorous which might go over well in a class but just made me groan. It is plain that he has had a balanced education he's not letting go to waste, despite the childhood obsession that became his life's work. Fortey weaves literature, personalities, and scandal into the trilobite story. It was hardly necessary; trilobites and all the minutiae involved fascinate me. Oh, and the eyes, their eyes! I have two more Forteys in the stack to read. They take such a gosh-awful long time to digest, but are worth it in the end.
I am also delighted that I too now know that Paradoxides is the "genus of the trilobite of the Middle Cambrian" just like Tim Brooke-Taylor. You have to follow ISIRTA to find that funny.