Kathy Reich's newest novel has Temperance Brennan in South Carolina, but is at least as interesting for the development of her characters and their tangled personal lives
Kathy Reich's ninth and newest novel is perhaps her best yet.
Temperance Brennan is leading an archeology field trip in South Carolina in May when her students find a corpse. To make matters worse, Brennan is in the middle of giving an interview to an obnoxious reporter when the find is made, and inevitably, it makes the newspapers.
An old friend who is also the local coroner asks for Brennan's help, particularly when a second -- this time headless -- body is found hanging from the branches of a tree. Despite the very different manner of death, this bosy shows the same unusual marks as the first, leading Brennan to the unsurprising conclusion that the daths are connected.
Reichs also throws in the usual sub-plots, including an obstreperous local developer unhappy at Brennan's finding a body on his proposed development site and Brennan's coroner friend's own personal issues, which drag Brennan in much more deeply than anyone would expect.
To add to the complexity, Brennan's ex has taken a job in the area, and she is manouvred into allowing to stay, which she knows isn't a good idea. The last time they spent any time together, they ended up having sex, and Brennan is already missing her partner, Detective Ryan, who is away sorting out his own family matters in Newfoundland.
Early in her career Reichs was often compared to Patricia Cornwell, who debuted a few years earlier to instant acclaim with Postmortem; the general consensus now is that Reichs has effortlessly outstripped her supposed rival. Whereas Cornwell has dead-ended herself into ever more grandiose plots, Reichs keeps her stories relatively simple, indeed in Cross Bones slyly mocking labyrinthine bestsellers such as The Da Vinci Code.
Reichs own afterword admits that this is the first of her novels not to be based on a single case, as well as defining the difference between a pathologist such as Cornwell's Scarpetta and Reich's forensic anthropologist Brennan:
"Pathologists are specialists who work with soft tissue. Anthropologists are specialists who work with bone. Freshly dead or relatively intact corpse: pathologist. Skeleton in a shallow grave, charred body in a barrel, bone fragments in a wood chipper, mummified baby in an attic trunk: anthropologist."
But what she has really done well in this latest book is to focus on the small details, such as Tempe's relationships, and there is a small but telling epilogue in which Brennan's confusion and uncertainty perfectly mirror the real world, and lifts the book to new heights.
