Book Review - Bones To Ashes by Kathy Reichs
Category Book Review Kathy Reichs Bones To Ashes
I've made no bones (no pun intended) that Kathy Reichs has permanently replaced Cornwell as my writer-of-choice when it comes to forensic anthropology novels. Her latest, Bones To Ashes, continues to entertain me, although this one seemed to be a bit slow coming out of the blocks. What I thought was going to be a "time-out" for a character development story picked up at the end and delivered a pretty tight finish.
Temperance Brennan is drawn into a case of skeletal identification that seemingly is a bit too close to home for her. She had a childhood friend named Evangeline who disappeared one year with no explanation as to what happened. Tempe's attempts to discover her whereabouts were met with silence and warnings to just let her go. Thirty years have passed, but Tempe hasn't forgotten her. Tempe's Montreal cop boyfriend is investigating a number of cold cases where either a young girl went missing and was never found, or they found a skeleton that was never identified. The timeframes and locations are such that Tempe can't help wondering if perhaps the skeleton on her table is her missing friend. The odds are one in a million, but they start getting narrower once Tempe and Ryan start digging into the past. Even though everyone's claiming the past is over and forgotten, some people are a bit too intent on keeping Tempe and Ryan from finding that out for themselves. And if those people are involved in any way with Evangeline's disappearance, that could mean that she ended her life in a very unpleasant and sordid fashion...
The start of the novel looked like it was going to be a diversion into Brennan's childhood as well as what I call a character development installment. Those are the books in a series that seem to lack some of the action that the author is known for, but that serve to add some additional background and color to the characters. It wasn't until Ryan's cold case efforts started intersecting with Brennan's work that the action angle started to pick up. The bad guys in the plot are truly nasty characters, but there are some interesting twists at the end that force you to re-examine your impressions. We're still not talking boy scouts, but there's some humanity there after all.
Bones to Ashes isn't the absolute best book in the series, but it's still a solid read. And any slowness at the start is more than made up for at the end...
I've made no bones (no pun intended) that Kathy Reichs has permanently replaced Cornwell as my writer-of-choice when it comes to forensic anthropology novels. Her latest, Bones To Ashes, continues to entertain me, although this one seemed to be a bit slow coming out of the blocks. What I thought was going to be a "time-out" for a character development story picked up at the end and delivered a pretty tight finish.
Temperance Brennan is drawn into a case of skeletal identification that seemingly is a bit too close to home for her. She had a childhood friend named Evangeline who disappeared one year with no explanation as to what happened. Tempe's attempts to discover her whereabouts were met with silence and warnings to just let her go. Thirty years have passed, but Tempe hasn't forgotten her. Tempe's Montreal cop boyfriend is investigating a number of cold cases where either a young girl went missing and was never found, or they found a skeleton that was never identified. The timeframes and locations are such that Tempe can't help wondering if perhaps the skeleton on her table is her missing friend. The odds are one in a million, but they start getting narrower once Tempe and Ryan start digging into the past. Even though everyone's claiming the past is over and forgotten, some people are a bit too intent on keeping Tempe and Ryan from finding that out for themselves. And if those people are involved in any way with Evangeline's disappearance, that could mean that she ended her life in a very unpleasant and sordid fashion...
The start of the novel looked like it was going to be a diversion into Brennan's childhood as well as what I call a character development installment. Those are the books in a series that seem to lack some of the action that the author is known for, but that serve to add some additional background and color to the characters. It wasn't until Ryan's cold case efforts started intersecting with Brennan's work that the action angle started to pick up. The bad guys in the plot are truly nasty characters, but there are some interesting twists at the end that force you to re-examine your impressions. We're still not talking boy scouts, but there's some humanity there after all.
Bones to Ashes isn't the absolute best book in the series, but it's still a solid read. And any slowness at the start is more than made up for at the end...
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