Skeleton Factory

In August 1975 a human from India and an alien from the planet Hara are murdered in a jute field near Calcutta. The human corpse is burned on a funeral pyre, but the alien's skeleton lands up in a high school biology class in Missouri. The biology teacher notices that the skeleton, although appearing to have been in his mid-thirties, shows no sign of normal wear and tear. She shares her discovery with her sister, Ann Lewis, then both the biology teacher and the skeleton disappear overnight. A dual search begins. Ann Lewis, in an attempt to locate her missing sister, follows the trail of the skeleton's purchase to India, to Rudyard Kipling's "City of Dreadful Night," and headlong into the bone trade, where human beings are killed for the value of their skulls and skeletons. Meanwhile, the aliens send Heartwood, their top detective, on a similar quest to find Mr. Beeble, the Haran who once inhabited the perfect skeleton, and to secure the supply line of the "fiber of life."