Thirteen Bones

On July 2, 1937, nearing the end of a flight around the world, aviation pioneers Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan disappeared over the Pacific. Despite a massive search, they were never found. Their fate remains a mystery to this day. Earhart's last generally accepted radio message put her on course that likely would have brought her close to Nikumaroro - then called Gardner Island - a tiny, uninhabited atoll in the Phoenix Islands. In early 1939, British authorities in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony launched the Phoenix Islands Settlement Scheme, and began to clear Gardner Island for coconut planting. In early 1940, the colonists found thirteen human bones near the island's southeast end, along with a sextant box, a Benedictine bottle, some corks, and a woman's shoe. In Thirteen Bones, author Tom King imagines the discovery and its aftermath through the eyes of the discoverers. Thirteen Bones is fiction, incorporating facts uncovered by The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery - TIGHAR - during twenty years of investigation into Earhart's and Noonan's disappearance. It includes the flurry of telegrams that went between Settlement Scheme Administrator Gerald B. Gallagher and his superiors in Fiji, reporting the discovery and deciding what to do about it. It proposes a geopolitical reason that the British authorities did not report the discovery to the Americans - even though the bones were suspected to be Earhart's.