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BREAK NO BONES
by Kathy Reichs
Pocket Books, August 2007
480 pages
$9.99
ISBN: 0743453034


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

The narrative conventions of mystery books demand certain assumptions always be played out; should an author try to avoid them, the universe will warp itself to push the plot back into place. A cozy heroine will always find the one clue the police couldn’t. Killers are always ready to strike again, even if it looks like they’ve gotten away with it and it’s been decades since their original crime. The ancient graveyard will always hide a fresh corpse. And the two unrelated cases will always turn out to be related.

Reichs uses two of these clichés, but she makes them fresh and fascinating with such skill that it’s no surprise that she has spun her heroine into a series of bestselling books and a hit TV show.

Temperance 'Tempe' Brennan spends a fair amount of BREAK NO BONES standing in for other people. Put in charge of a suddenly-teacherless university archeological excavation, she leads the students down to Dewees Island, in part to check out a prehistoric burial site before bulldozers turn it into a parking lot and in part to spend some time with her friend Emma, the local coroner.

But Emma is ill, so Tempe finds herself taking over more and more of the job to spare Emma’s flagging energy. Negotiating that without insulting her friend or stepping on toes in the local police jurisdictions is difficult enough, but Tempe finds herself dealing with equally difficult negotiations in her personal life, caught between her boyfriend and her estranged husband.

The students find a modern body among the prehistoric bones. John Doe has little to recommend himself except for an odd cracking along his vertebra and some strange gouges on other bones. Emma and Tempe do what they can to find out his identity, then move on to other cases, such as the man found hanging with someone else’s ID in his wallet.

In the meantime, the estranged Pete’s in town finding the whereabouts of a runaway girl and the money she took, both of which went missing soon after she was converted by, and then fought with, a local evangelist. The cases cross when the hanging body is identified as the detective who had been tracking the missing girl.

The narrative inevitabilities out of the way, Reichs starts building the real mystery. Emma and Tempe keep finding bodies – old and new – that show the same mysterious cracks and chips among the bones. The plot keeps twisting, adding surprise to surprise as it races to its confrontational conclusion.

I’m not normally a reader of Reichs’ books, but BREAK NO BONES and its sequel have made a believer out of me. She has created a fascinating book, one that would suit not only Tempe fans, but also anyone who likes tightly-plotted forensics novels. If you haven’t met Tempe yet, or if your only experience has been via watching Bones, BREAK NO BONES is an excellent introduction.

Reviewed by Linnea Dodson, September 2007

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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