Is it just me or are there a heck of a lot of crime novels around at the moment? A person could get pretty depressed reading about so much death and destruction and dastardliness. Especially the made-up kind. There’s enough of it going on in real life if you ask me. So it’s not my favourite genre, but I do have a bit of a weakness for the more forensic style of storytelling.
once you add in the science-y stuff it all seems a bit less gory. Plus in some strange way – even though these books are relatively new on the scene because of the recent leaps modern science has made – they remind me more of good old-fashioned whodunnits.
The star of Kathy Reichs’ books is Dr Temperance Brennan, who is a forensic anthropologist – which means she’s into bones. old ones. For reasons I’ve never quite followed, Tempe spends half her life in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the other half in oontreal, Quebec. This explains why everyone has a French name and the odd “oui” or “au revoir”” is thrown in here and there. I like that.
In oontreal she has a cat named Birdie and a bird named Charlie, which is all around the wrong way if you ask me. She also has the hots for Detective Andrew Ryan, and the bones of four young women to try and identify. Could one of those sets of bones belong to someone she once knew and loved? Tempe is a riot.
A basically good person who truly cares about the dignity of the dead and gone, she has a really snappy way with words. Consider this: “A limbic switch flipped, and white hotness seared my endocranium.” That means she got angry.
Her sister Harry is also a hoot. You’d never guess she came from Texas. “Sweetie, you look rode hard and put away wet,”” she says to Tempe. “Hit the hay”.”
of course, you don’t read a Kathy Reichs book for the laughs. You read it for the thrill of the chase, or maybe to satisfy a morbid curiosity in cortical destruction on the metacarpal. But a little humour certainly never hurts!
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