Books 10 & 11 were Deja Dead and Death du Jour both by Kathy Reichs. These were recommended to me by my American friend Sara and I ordered both off Booktopia. They’re books 1 & 2 in the on-going series about Temperance Brennan, a forensic anthropologist who works between North Carolina and Montreal. The first book takes place in Montreal, the second is split between Brennan’s two homes. After the last few books I’ve read were vaguely disappointing in some way or other, it was good to get a couple of reads in a row that were gripping. I love this sort of thing really, even though the gory details of autopsies and putrefying bodies can be a bit much at times! But I was a big fan of the TV show Crossing Jordan and I love the early Kay Scarpetta books. And these books are like the Kay Scarpetta books when the Kay Scarpetta books were still good!
Temperance is a bone expert – she can tell the age, sex, race etc of a corpse just by analysing the skeletal remains. Her expertise is used in Montreal in terms of identifying features about skeletal remains – firstly determining if they are human and dating their times of death and various other details. In Book 1 she is convinced that she has found the remains of the victim of a serial killer – both bodies were dismembered the same way and carry identical marks from the same tools. She connects these cases to others – even though some of the victims were not dismembered and different weapons were used, she is still firmly of the opinion that the murders were all done by the same person. She has a hard time convincing the detectives in charge of the cases of this though, so naturally, like all good heroines, she undertakes some investigating of her own to prove her point. Although I found one scene, where she goes to an abandoned monastery grounds where she suspects a body is buried, alone and in a violent storm, a bit over the top and unlike anything any normal, sane person would do, I absolutely loved the book. The pace was faultless, the facts incredible (the author is a forensic anthropologist herself and claims that she doesn’t describe anything in her books that she hasn’t personally done), the characters believable and likable. The end was downright chilling and even though I knew she survived (duh, I have book 2, lol) it was still a heart-in-mouth sort of finale.
4/5
Book 2 was a bit harder for me get into at first, as it involved the vicious murder of 4 month old twins. I found the autopsy scene a struggle and kept seeing tiny little babies in my head as I read it. This didn’t diminish my liking for the book, it’s just my personal “taboo” subject that I struggle with. Hurt and tortured babies are enough to make me weep. The book begins with Temperance being called to the scene of a house fire where at first they find two victims in a bedroom upstairs and then a third in the basement. Temperance recovers the remains and sets about finding out who the victim was, how old, etc before heading back to North Carolina for the commencement of her lecturing year. There she gets drawn into another gruesome discovery of a corpse and more bodies are found in the house fire, two adults and two infant babies. In a bizarre twist, the two cases, the one in Canada and the one in the US turn out to be connected. The ending is once again a bit of a life threatening confrontation with Temperance running headlong into it but I’m used to that from about every episode of Crossing Jordan ever, so I’m okay with a bit of a drawn out dramatic ending!
4/5
I liked them both so much I have already ordered book #3 from Booktopia. And I also bought season 1 of Bones on dvd as well. Bones’ main character is a forensic anthropologist named Temperance Brennan, who is actually based on Kathy Reichs herself. Temperance in the show also writes novels…about a forensic anthropologist named Kathy Reichs, which I thought was a cute little swap. My mother has watched Bones for 5 years now, but I’ve never bothered with it as I don’t much like David Boreanaz. But I’m going to give it a go now as I know Kathy Reichs is pretty involved, as it is based on her. If I like it, I’ll start to pick up the other seasons.
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