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DEVIL BONES
by Kathy Reichs
Scribner, August 2008
310 pages
$25.95
ISBN: 0743294386


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

The eleventh Temperance Brennan book leads to personal and professional complications for our heroine. On the private side, her daughter is playing matchmaker, setting her up mother on blind dates with someone who might be interesting if Tempe were not still working over her feelings for Ryan, who broke up with her in a previous book.

Professionally, she has to cope with lurid media coverage of several deaths, apparently related to witchcraft. First, a plumber found more than a leak when he accidentally opened a sub-basement door and discovered a voodoo altar, complete with human skull. Worse, there was a cauldron containing a human brain and a photograph of a teenaged girl who fits the skull's parameters.

Then another body is found – male, headless, and carved with satanic symbols. The newspapers, which had already been running sensationalist stories about the skull, go into overdrive. So does the career of an ambitious commissioner, Boyce Lingo, who intends to march at the head of a Christian army right into higher office, whipping up a modern witchhunt to cleanse the city. Furious that he is breaking the peace and endangering the investigation, Tempe lets him have a piece of her mind – something Lingo leaps on as evidence of conspiracy and coverup. He continues to grandstand, and Tempe is warned to keep away from him. This she is having trouble doing as he continues to infuriate her, even when she's told that her job could be on the line if she doesn't shut up.

When she finds herself tempted to drink again to deal with all the pressure after so many years of sobriety, she could be equally in trouble off the job. And that's not even taking into account the woman who appears to be stalking Tempe from crime scene to crime scene.

DEVIL BONES isn't the strongest entry in the Temperance Brennan series, but Reichs on a bad day is better than many other authors on a good one. She's put in a lot of research, drawing clear (and accurate) lines between Santeria, Satanism, and Wicca. The book may be a little too heavy on exposition, but the puzzle is well-paced and Tempe's frustrations with her daughter's meddling, her staggering love life, and Lingo's goading ring completely true.

Reviewed by Linnea Dodson, September 2008

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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