Cold, Cold Bones: 'Kathy Reichs has written her masterpiece' (Michael Connelly)

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As always, this is a gripping, edge-of-your-seat read, one you are sure to race through as Tempe tries to get to the bottom of the copycat killings. It seems unfathomable that someone is targetting Tempe as it would mean they’re playing the long game, having patiently waited years for their chance to seek revenge or payback (or whatever motivates them). Reichs, skilfully using the conventions of the mystery novel, forces the reader to face up to the obscene realities of death time and time again.

Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. There seems to be no pattern to these killings, except that each mimics a killing connected to something a younger Tempe experienced, or barely escaped.Temperance Brennan uses all her skills as a forensic anthropologist to solve a murder mystery story that races across America at the speed of fright. The writing is especially sharp here; the story is intense; and Tempe is at her snarky, brook-no-idiots, don’t-mess-with-me best . Try reading past Temperance Brennan adventures like Bones Never Lie, Break No Bones, and Bones of the Lost. And she was the central character in If It Bleeds, a novella in the 2020 collection of the same name. I owe Kathy and Tempe a debt of gratitude, not just for helping to make my own writing life possible but for hours of white-knuckle reading.

A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people. King uses the phrase keeping it on the down-low in a way that suggests he probably doesn’t understand how this phrase is currently used—and has been used for quite a while. In case you are unfamiliar with Reichs, she is a forensic anthropologist herself – meaning the character of Tempe is about as authentic as it gets. Freed from a heavy work schedule, Tempe Brennan is content to dote on her daughter, Katy, but their peaceful idyll is interrupted when they find a box on the back porch. On page 217, Tempe’s investigation of the hit-and-run victim sparks a powerful emotional reaction, one that she seems to be alone in experiencing.The characteristic that I prize about all else is storytelling, and Cold Cold Bones held my attention. At its core, Cold, Cold Bones is a novel of revenge—one in which revisiting the past may prove the only way to unravel the present. She’s prickly and her moods variable and Tempe suspects PTSD, so when Katy goes AWOL her mother is worried.

I await the next Kathy Reichs thriller with the same anticipation I have for the new Lee Child or Patricia Cornwell.The directions lead to a macabre discovery behind a Benedictine monastery—which brings further revelations involving a series of seemingly unconnected violent murders. Cold, Cold Bones reanimates all the ghosts from Temperance Brennan’s forensic past until they thoroughly haunt her present. On page 51, Katy asks her mother if she knows how many people are unhoused in the United States, then informs her there are “over half a million. Unconnected until Tempe realizes what they all have in common: a resemblance to her own previous cases. GPS coordinates etched into the eyeball lead to a Benedictine monastery where an equally macabre discovery awaits.