Books : Crime, Thrillers & Mystery : Authors, A-Z : R : Reichs, Kathy

Shop Categories

...R

Devil Bones

Kathy Reichs
Bones to Ashes

Kathy Reichs
Deja Dead

Kathy Reichs

Reichs' stunning debut thriller draws on her experience as a forensic anthropologist in North Carolina and Montreal, but it has considerably more going for it than the mere stamp of authenticity. The devil is in the details, and it is the small betraying details--the alignment of cuts in bloody bone--that convince Temperance Brennan that a series of women, murdered in different ways, were killed and dismembered by the same hand and the same saw. Knowing what she knows is one thing, but convincing her police colleagues is quite another.
Reichs skilfully depicts police canteen culture and the way it ensures that someone who is an expert outsider, not one of the lads, is always going to have to go that extra mile to prove herself and her ideas. Brennan is a toughie, though, and not too fussy about demarcation disputes. Reichs has found a way of having her cake and eating it and giving us a detective who combines professional expertise with enthusiastic amateurism. Even more compellingly, the suspense is turned up several notches when Brennan realizes that she is hunted as well as hunter--they find the killer's lair and find her photograph among his trophies... --Roz Kaveney
Death Du Jour

Kathy Reichs

After one of the more startling crime debuts of recent years, Déjà Dead, Kathy Reichs has found herself, at a stroke, regarded as a possible contender for Patricia Cornwell's crown as queen of forensic detection novels. As the new book opens, her forensic anthropologist heroine Temperance Brennan is doing what she usually does--helping to identify remains about which there is almost nothing suspicious. In this case she is dealing with a 19th-century nun of vast sanctity, for whose beatification her relics and burial site need authenticating. What could be simpler or less menacing? Almost immediately, Tempe is called in on a bad case: arson, which has left remains so damaged that a normal pathologist cannot cope--and the victims that pathologists normally cope with include infants stabbed to death.
Something sinister is going on, and whether in Quebec, where she has her practice, or the sleepy South, where she teaches, Tempe is not safe. Reichs' first book was good on the domesticity and friendship to which Tempe retreats--and this time we meet her younger sister, Harriet, who has just got rid of her balloonist lover and is looking for a new interest. --Roz Kaveney
Grave Secrets

Kathy Reichs

Kathy Reichs publishers' comparisons of her with the mega-selling Patricia Cornwell are based on the fact that more and more people (readers, critics, other writers) are calling her better than Cornwell! On the evidence of Reichs' splendid new novel, Grave Secrets the answer is yes--particularly as several recent Cornwell titles have been misfires.
Reichs' speciality is the powerfully realised female protagonist: Dr Temperance Brennan is the best of the many forensic specialists rubbing shoulders in the genre at present: she's professional (never, of course, fazed by her often grisly work), forceful in everything but her messy private life. This time, Tempe travels to the Guatemalan village of Chupan Ya tracking the bodies of 23 women and children dumped in a mass grave. But while digging in the pit of death, Tempe finds the present contains further horrors: four girls have gone missing from Guatemala city--and one of them is the daughter of an ambassador. Soon Tempe is up against both a recalcitrant district attorney and municipal corruption, grimly aware that there are those who want the deaths in both the past and the present to remain a mystery.
What makes this such a distinguished addition to the Reichs library (in a class with such winners as Death du Jour) is the brilliantly realised Guatemalan locales. Not many thriller writers can evoke comparison with such masters of foreign climes as Graham Greene, but Reichs pulls it off with aplomb. The web of deceit that Dr Brennan encounters is satisfyingly tangled, and the unravelling of the mystery has all the quirky energy of Reichs at her most stylish. Perhaps future Brennan outings will have to bring in new personal elements for the heroine to avoid staleness, but Grave Secrets has everything in place for the most diverting of reading experiences. --Barry Forshaw
Break No Bones

Kathy Reichs

It must be harder and harder for Kathy Reichs to keep each new novel as forceful and dramatic as the one before--not that delicate effects (which are not Reichs' thing!) are particularly easy, but there is a danger in a certain fatigue setting in for the reader when an author puts them so comprehensively through the ringer with each novel as Reichs does. Break No Bones is proof positive that the author still knows how to cannily ring the changes on theme of her earlier work--this one is every bit as unsettling as Bare Bones or Grave Secrets, but the path Reichs takes to our pulse rate is somewhat different.
Dr Temperance Brennan is working with her students at an archaeological field school on an Island near Charleston , South Carolina. A decomposing corpse is discovered in a shallow grave, showing evidence (connected vertebra, etc.,) that the body has not been dead for long. While engaged in this mystery, Tempe's own life encounters real havoc when a bullet, possibly meant for her, hospitalises her estranged husband Peter; and her new relationship with Detective Andrew Ryan is in trouble. But, as so often before, cracking a mystery may cost her her life.
All of this is handled with the assurance that we have come to expect from Reichs, but there are new things here: Reichs' sense of structure has always been strongly linear, but the extra looseness of the narrative pays dividends in disorienting the reader. Set pieces, too, are more integrated, though with all the usual capacity to raise hairs on the back of the neck. When so many authors are repeating themselves to ever-diminishing effect, it's good to see Reichs is clearly not content to rest on her laurels.
--Barry Forshaw
Deadly Decisions

Kathy Reichs

Kathy Reichs' forensic anthropologist Tempe Brennan is arguably the best of the current crop of thriller pathologists; her third outing, Deadly Decisions, pits her reconstructive skills against a bunch of Hell's Angels with a taste for ultra-violence. Hardly has she pieced together the jigsaw fragments of identical twins, before she finds herself engaged in identifying the teenage girl whose skull and long bones turned up near the grave of some earlier victims of inter-gang strife. Her sweetheart Ryan is under investigation for corruption; her nephew is sleeping on the sofa and showing an unholy fascination with bikes and bikers; and Tempe is having a series of really bad hair days. In addition to the usual fascinating material about the identification of human bones, Reichs tells us all about the way in which biker gangs have become a serious part of the criminal underworld, a subculture with a taste for mayhem and with rules it is death to break. Tempe is on her usual brittle good form--a woman torn between her cold clinical intelligence and a crusading desire to avenge the helpless that regularly brings her into conflict with more quietly committed colleagues. This is an excellent thriller that combines real intelligence with a radical social anger. --Roz Kaveney
Fatal Voyage

Kathy Reichs

Tempe Brennan, Kathy Reichs' forensic anthropologist heroine, often finds herself in physical jeopardy. In Fatal Voyage, her fourth outing, someone is trying to kill her and also to destroy her professional reputation with trumped-up charges of unethical behaviour.
Tempe is called in when a plane full of college athletes goes down in the remoter parts of the forests of North Carolina. She finds herself investigating a spare foot she rescued from coyotes, a foot which is significantly more decomposed than the crash victims and which has symptoms of gout, a disease most of the dead young people had no time to contract. There is a locked house and walled courtyard out in the woods that do not appear on any maps and it seems almost as if her simple knowledge of their being there has offended the powerful of the world.
As always, Kathy Reichs manages to combine a detailed knowledge of who the dead were and how they died with a profound sense of the sadness of things. This is a book that never lets us forget amid the dissections and tests for genetic markers that each human death is that of a tragic and irreplaceable human being. Tempe is one of the more attractive of the current crop of women detectives simply because she is flawed and vulnerable as well as smart, righteous and brave. Reichs never lets you forget that crime novels should acquaint us with good people as well as human evil. --Roz Kaveney
Skeleton

Kathy Reichs
Cross Bones

Kathy Reichs
Bare Bones

Kathy Reichs

In Bare Bones Kathy Reichs leads her heroine, Temperance Brennan, into one of her scariest, most gruesome adventures yet. As fans of this popular series already know, Tempe is a forensic anthropologist: an expert in the human form (especially bones) who helps solve crimes. A dead baby is only the first in a series of grisly remains, both human and animal, that Tempe must sort through and decode. Meanwhile, as several seemingly unrelated cases begin to intertwine, her sleuthing puts her in the crosshairs of a very nasty stalker who hides behind an e-mail alias.
Reichs knows how to keep the narrative ball rolling with a canny mix of plot developments, character delineation and scientific detail, all relayed via Tempe's smart, breezy, sarcastic voice. In fact, Bare Bones has a few too many characters and plot lines for Reichs--or most readers--to keep perfect track of. But it's a fun ride anyway, enlivened by some steamy romantic scenes and some fascinating, appalling facts about the illicit trade in endangered wildlife, including the information that bears' gall bladders fetch more money per ounce than cocaine. Bare Bones is a crisp, enjoyable read that cements Kathy Reichs' standing as the best forensic-thriller writer at work today. --Nicholas H Allison, Amazon.com
Devil Bones

Kathy Reichs
Bones to Ashes

Kathy Reichs

Kathy Reichs is something special. Since achieving a secure position in the upper echelons of crime writers, she has refused to rest on her laurels and (with only the occasional misstep) has consolidated her success with a series of novels that subtly finesse the formula that has gleaned her so many readers.
Bones to Ashes is the latest title to add lustre to her reputation. Dr Temperance Brennan is examining the skeleton of a young girl, and finds herself losing the necessary distance she tries to maintain from all the cases she works on. Are the bones deformed or diseased? Or has some post-mortem damage been wrought upon them? Coroner Yves Bradette seems prepared file this information in the Dead Letters Department -- an ancient case, with no current relevance. But (as so often before) Tempe has other ideas, and something is stirring in her synapses -- a mystery involving the disappearance of a childhood friend. Matters are complicated when Detective Andrew Ryan (assigned to an allied case) asks Tempe to help with three missing persons - a trio of unidentified female corpses. Is there a serial killer at work?
There is often a defining moment when the work of a much-loved author imperceptibly becomes over-familiar, and readers have less enthusiasm for their work. Thankfully, on the evidence of Bones to Ashes, that day is quite some time in the future for Kathy Reichs, as all the elements that have made her books so involving are still being polished and refined here. Followers of Temperance Brennan need not hesitate to add this to their collection. --Barry Forshaw
Devil Bones

Kathy Reichs
Playback

Raymond Chandler
Monday Mourning

Kathy Reichs

In Monday Mourning Tempe Brennan finds the bones of three dead adolescents in a basement and she has to convince her police colleagues that they are recent enough that the case should be investigated. The book has all the technical know-how, crisply explained, that we expect from Kathy Reichs; readers find themselves peering over Tempe's shoulder as she works out, not only the solution to a puzzle, but how to begin to solve it.
Reichs is a practising forensic archaeologist in real life--but she never forgets that her readers cannot be expected to know everything she does. For a genuine expert though, she is remarkably unpatronising to our ignorance--one of the reasons why Tempe has so many colleagues who know comparatively little is so that her explanations can instruct us while we watch prickly Tempe tread on colleagues' toes. Like all of Reichs' books, Monday Mourning has a pronounced sense of place--Montreal in the snow has rarely seemed so real. If there is a downside to this clever police procedural, it is that we get rather too much of Tempe's fairly conventional emotional life--apparent problems with her lover Ryan end up in quite the corniest of explanations for apparent individuality, while her concern for an apparently suicidal friend adds artificial suspense to a plot that was doing the whole thing quite well in the first place. --Roz Kaveney
Bones to Ashes

Kathy Reichs
Deadly Decisions

Kathy Reichs

Kathy Reichs' forensic anthropologist Tempe Brennan is arguably the best of the current crop of thriller pathologists; her third outing, Deadly Decisions, pits her reconstructive skills against a bunch of Hell's Angels with a taste for ultra-violence. Hardly has she pieced together the jigsaw fragments of identical twins, before she finds herself engaged in identifying the teenage girl whose skull and long bones turned up near the grave of some earlier victims of inter-gang strife. Her sweetheart Ryan is under investigation for corruption; her nephew is sleeping on the sofa and showing an unholy fascination with bikes and bikers; and Tempe is having a series of really bad hair days. In addition to the usual fascinating material about the identification of human bones, Reichs tells us all about the way in which biker gangs have become a serious part of the criminal underworld, a subculture with a taste for mayhem and with rules it is death to break. Tempe is on her usual brittle good form--a woman torn between her cold clinical intelligence and a crusading desire to avenge the helpless that regularly brings her into conflict with more quietly committed colleagues. This is an excellent thriller that combines real intelligence with a radical social anger. --Roz Kaveney
Monday Mourning

Kathy Reichs

In Monday Mourning Tempe Brennan finds the bones of three dead adolescents in a basement and she has to convince her police colleagues that they are recent enough that the case should be investigated. The book has all the technical know-how, crisply explained, that we expect from Kathy Reichs; readers find themselves peering over Tempe's shoulder as she works out, not only the solution to a puzzle, but how to begin to solve it.
Reichs is a practising forensic archaeologist in real life--but she never forgets that her readers cannot be expected to know everything she does. For a genuine expert though, she is remarkably unpatronising to our ignorance--one of the reasons why Tempe has so many colleagues who know comparatively little is so that her explanations can instruct us while we watch prickly Tempe tread on colleagues' toes. Like all of Reichs' books, Monday Mourning has a pronounced sense of place--Montreal in the snow has rarely seemed so real. If there is a downside to this clever police procedural, it is that we get rather too much of Tempe's fairly conventional emotional life--apparent problems with her lover Ryan end up in quite the corniest of explanations for apparent individuality, while her concern for an apparently suicidal friend adds artificial suspense to a plot that was doing the whole thing quite well in the first place. --Roz Kaveney
Bones to Ashes

Kathy Reichs