Birthright

Birthright is a novel by Nora Roberts, published in 2003. It begins with a discovery: human bones five thousand years old are found at a construction site in a small town.

The find draws the archaeologist Callie Dunbrook out of her sabbatical and into the dig that follows. While she is running it she has to account for the deaths and misfortunes that gather around the project, which feeds the rumour that the site is cursed.

She also has to work with her irritating and irresistible ex-husband, Jake, whose presence on the dig is one more complication she did not plan for. The novel runs the professional problem and the personal one together, because the site will not give up its answers without both. What she and Jake know is only what the site has given them so far, and the rest is rumour.

It is a romantic suspense story about a scientist who wanted a quiet year and got a discovery instead, and about what five thousand years of distance does to the way people argue about the present.