by C de Burlet

Created on: April 21, 2009   Last Updated: March 11, 2010

The tenth novel of the Temperance Brennan series by Kathy Reichs opens with Tempe remembering growing up in Chicago, the destruction of family-life, and the move to Carolina. What pulled her through was the friendship with Acadian Evangeline and her sister Obeline, who spent summer-holidays with Cajun family members in Carolina. This friendship ended abruptly with the sudden disappearance of Evangeline and her sister. Though Tempe and her sister Harry tried very hard to solve this mystery, as kids they were unable to.

Fast forward and Tempe has arrived in Montreal where her boss asks her to help determine if a sensitive case is accidental death, or murder. In no time, her specific forensic expertise is needed in other cases. There are a mysterious skeleton and the body of a girl, which may be linked to a series of other disappearances.

It doesn't take long for both Harry and Tempe to start doing some detective work themselves. By the end of the book, with the help of policemen Ryan and Hippo, the sisters have not only solved the cases, but also the disappearance of their childhood-friends Evangeline and Obeline.

As usual in Reichs' novels, Tempe's work enables Reichs not only to write absorbing thrillers, but also to explain to readers various aspects of forensic science and how other studies may be used to solve mysteries.

In this book for instance, a linguist becomes involved and there follows a long conversation between him and Tempe on how someone's first language can still be determined though that person writes in another language. The conversation starts on page 277 and ends on page 282.

Such technical explanations may be crucial to plot-development and solution, but this particular one is in the middle of a scene, when there is a chase going on, Harry has gone missing, Tempe's stuck in the middle of nowhere, tension has been building and things are coming to a head. There the reader is: on the edge of his chair, desperately wanting to know what happens next, what happens next. Yet the author expects him to patiently plow through about 5 to 6 pages of technical explanation on "learner's English" and how to determine whether someone has say Spanish or Italian as his mother's tongue. Is this irksome? Yes! Is this the only time it happens in the book? No!

Readers who don't mind, or who just skip several pages to get on with developments, may also suspect what the cause of death was of the mystery skeleton and why Evangeline and Obeline disappeared, pages before Tempe hits upon a solution.

Yet, like the preceding nine books, this one is certainly a good read. In the end, all the story-lines are wrapped up nicely. Many readers can even congratulate themselves on being better sleuths than Tempe, while the combination of crime, history, forensics, pace, story-lines, as well as surprise revelations make this an engrossing thriller.

"Bones to Ashes" by Kathy Reichs, published by W Heinemann in 2007, pp 310

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