My copy of this lovely book was a hardback I checked out from the local library nearly a week ago.  It was printed by Scribner which is a trademark of Simon and Schuster Inc.  It was copyrighted in 1997 by Kathleen J. Reichs.  It’s the first of her books starring Dr. Temperance Brennan, a forensic anthropologist.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book.  The television series called Bones was loosely based on the book series written by Kathy Reichs.

Before I go on, I want to tell you what  forensic anthropology is – for those of you who don’t know.

Generally speaking forensic anthropology is the examination of human skeletal remains for law enforcement agencies to help with the recovery of human remains, determine the identity of unidentified human remains, interpret trauma, and estimate time since death. … Anthropology alone is the study of man.

A coroner does something similar : The coroner’s jurisdiction is limited to determining who the deceased was and how, when and where they came by their death. When the death is suspected to have been either sudden with unknown cause, violent, or unnatural, the coroner decides whether to hold a post-mortem examination and, if necessary, an inquest.

Now that I’ve helped define the difference between the two jobs and thus, have shown the two can assist each other without repeating things, I’ll go on with my review.  If you have any questions, feel free to post them in the comments below, and I’ll answer as best I can.

Now, Dr. Temperance (Tempe to her friends) Brennan has been in Canada for a year working for the Laboratoire de Medecine Legal in the province of Quebec, but she hasn’t been involved in anything major until she’s called out the the site of a body dump.  The body has been skillfully dismembered and wrapped in plastic trash bags before being buried.  The torso has been disfigured horribly.  This is only the first as Temperance becomes involved in what turns out to be a string of similar deaths.

Making life difficult for our heroine is Luc Claudel, a Homicide Investigator who seems to have it in for her.  His partner, Michel Charbonneau, tries to assist.  Temperance does get some added assistance from Andrew Ryan, another investigator who caught one of the cases she has managed to link to the one she was called out on.  It doesn’t help Temperance goes investigating on her own and draws the attention of the murderer!

Mingled in with the investigation is Temperance’s relationship with her close friend from grad school, Gabriel (Gabby) Macaulay.  Gabby is busy with a research study involving the local prostitutes, and she comes to Temperance full of fear for a man who is stalking her.  Gabby’s state of mind is erratic even as she tries to take care of herself despite Temperance’s objections and repeated offers of help.

The story flows like a river from one end to the other.  At times, it becomes tumultuous with action and suspense before smoothing out again, but it never wavers or runs off in different directions leaving sidelines to bottom out.

Characters are well developed, even the secondary ones, and I actually cared about them – even got mad at Claudel for how he was treating our heroine!

I highly recommend this book for those of you who like murder mysteries!

See you on the flipside and don’t forget your towel and sonic screwdriver!!

Yep, I’m back.  I am having to log on at the local library since I still don’t have internet service out in the boonies where I’m living.  Still, I’m able to post again.

The bad news to this is I’m only able to come to the library because the friend I was caring for has passed on.  It’s good for her since she’s no longer in pain, but it’s bad for me because I am no longer employed.  I’m not taking her loss well either so forgive me if I’m not as upbeat as I have been in the past.  She was a good friend, a good person, and I miss her a lot.

I do have some good news, of sorts.  I’ve been using CreateSpace, the self publishing platform of Amazon, for my print books, and they’ve been merged with Kindle. This means I can set up  both print and ebooks on the same platform now which will save me a lot of time.  All of my print books have already been moved, and I’m in the process of creating ebooks now.  It’s a lot more time consuming and work intensive than I thought!  I’m not very good at it either, not with the visual aspect of it, but I’m learning as I go along.  The only downside to this, that I’ve seen so far, is when I publish the ebook, I can’t go back and fix it later when I decide I really don’t like the look.  I’ll have to talk to Kindle about it to learn more about the process before I go further.

I’ll be posting the links to the ebooks as they come live, but you can also find them on Amazon by their titles.  All of my books are available in print form.

I’ll see you on the flipside and don’t forget your towel and sonic screwdriver!