Kathy Reichs, Fire and Bones
Ms. Reichs has written twenty-three crime procedure novels
featuring a forensic anthropologist named Temperance Brennan. The jacket
sidebars are quite giddy in their claims of excellence. She is top-notch, amazing, and an incredible
plotter. Her science is on-target, her characters are fascinating, and every
paragraph carries menace. I wish I could join in affirming this praise, but
frankly I found Fire and Bones
rather disjointed and tedious. We do get plenty of gory details of what
it is like to autopsy people killed by fire, but the villains don’t seem to draw
out compelling interest while the victims get little emotional attention aside
from their existence as statistics.
The story is fairly simple. Temperance Brennan puts off a
great weekend with her current squeeze to help investigate two nasty fires that
came complete with four fatalities so badly burned that they are hard to
identify. One of the burned-out structures also contained a much older
unidentified corpse that is discovered in a burlap sack in a sub-basement. The
first four deaths turn out to be connected to old criminal gangs and
bootlegging and the other goes back even further in time. As we cycle between
the two different cases, the last one seems to get lost until the author
decided she must tie that one up with a final twist. It came off as a forced
afterthought.
I found the supporting characters to be either unbelievable,
like Ivy Doyle, the way too rich sidekick telejournalist. She just doesn’t make
a very satisfying Dr. Watson and the various arson detectives come off as pretty
traditional types rather than people.
In sum, I found this a pretty modest offering. I won’t be
heading back to the library to search out any of the earlier books. I give it a two out of five.
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