| Product: |
Break No Bones - Kathy Reichs |
| Date: |
09/11/07 (37 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Gripping plot that starts small then snowballs into something bigger
Disadvantages: book drags a little (very little) towards the end but otherwise her usual standard of crime thriller
The ninth installment in the highly popular and best-selling Tempe Brennan series of novels written by real-life forensic anthropologist, Kathy Reichs carries on in the tradition of it's predescessors with another gripping and ingenious mystery that begs to be solved.
Tempe is on a controversial archeological dig with students when she encounters a decomposed body too recent to be part of the excavation. Reporting the possible suspicious death to her best friend and local coroner, Emma Rousseau, Tempe discovers her friend is terminally ill and unable to investigate further as she struggles to hide the seriousness of her illness from her colleagues. As a favour, Tempe agrees to co-ordinate with the local authorities in a bid to unravel the identity of her mystery corpse and discover a possible cause of death; then other bodies begin to turn up that appear to be linked both to the original body from the excavation and a missing persons case currently being looked into by someone Tempe knows very very well.
Enter Tempe's estranged husband from whom she has long been seperated yet still maintains a very close (but platonic) relationship with much to the jealousy of her current on-off beau, Canadian Homicide Detective Ryan. When all three end up sharing time under the same roof, there is more than a little tension at first that slowly begins to unravel as the trio find themselves getting involved in far more than Tempe could ever have bargained for when she first began excavating her dig...
Break no bones is by no means the best of Reich's work to date but it is far from the worst and even on an off-day, she is still able to leave her closest competitors stranded in her wake with her amazingly authentic plots that seem to carry the story along constantly at a break-neck pace. Some people have commented that her books are sometimes bogged down by all the scientific mumbo-jumbo she uses in her novels but I always find this just reminds the reader that here is a novellist that knows what she is talking about and simply adds to the authenticity and realism of her books!! Of course just like the late lamented Jessica Fletcher and Dick Van Dyke in Diagnosis Murder, it seems as though Tempe cannot do anything in her life without stumbling across a crime scene (even her estranged ex-husband mentions as much in a sly nod to the reader during the course of the novel) but then a book which consisted simply of Tempe doing her chores and goingt shopping for food probably wouldn't sell as well I'm guessing -lol!!
One of the more interesting parts of this novel is the author's note at the end that explains from whence Reichs has got much of her inspiration for her preceeding books in the Tempe Brennan series and attempts to link the recent T.V show based on her novels into some kind of perspective with the books. A point to note is that her most recent novel (the next book after this) also comes complete at the moment with the first episode from season one of Bones (as her T.V series is affectionally known) but having watched a couple of episodes from the boxset I recieved last year as an xmas present I can honestly say that I'm not the shows biggest fan. Still maybe I just need to detach the books from the show a little more-something which untill now I have found difficult to do.
Certainly if you are a big fan of the novels so far, you will not be disappointed by this next installment and if you haven't read any of Reichs books before- never fear; I didn't really feel as though I needed to read the others before this to enjoy the book (though it does give the reader an advantage) as it is fairly easy to pick up whats going on vis-a-vis the whole ex-husband/ new boyfriend theme without any previous background information and there is very little aside from the main characters that links this to the other books in the series.
I'm hoping that we return to some of the diffrent scenario's seen in Reich's previous novels for her next work (previous plots included Tempe at the scene of a plane crash doing recovery work of the bodies and performing a dig on mass war graves in Guatamela) but as long as the standard stays as consistent as this, I'm sure I will remain faithful and loyal to my favourite female author of the moment....
Summary: An archelogical dig in South Carolina turns up a body that shouldn't belong......
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