A Conspiracy of Bones

Starred review from December 23, 2019
Bestseller Reichs’s excellent 19th Temperance Brennan novel (after 2015’s Speaking in Bones) finds the forensic anthropologist at her breaking point after a series of traumatic events, including the murder of her boss, who was succeeded by a woman who regards Brennan as persona non grata; her mother’s cancer diagnosis; and the discovery that Brennan herself has a potentially fatal aneurysm. She begins to doubt her own senses when she thinks she spots a man in a trench coat lurking outside her Charlotte, N.C., home in the middle of the night, but fears that it might have just been a hallucination. She’s then rattled to receive grisly images on her phone of an eviscerated male corpse without a face. Hooked by the mystery of who sent the pictures and why, Brennan risks her professional standing by pursuing the matter, despite the opposition of Charlotte’s new medical examiner. The trail takes multiple unexpected turns as Brennan pursues leads connected to bioweapons, a ferry sinking, and the Dark Web, in this crackerjack puzzle. CSI junkies who haven’t read Reichs before will be hooked.

January 15, 2020
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan. A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it's been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department's earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner's analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn't exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe's identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.'s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe's own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in "Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?" Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine's survival.

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Starred review from January 1, 2020
Following Speaking in Bones (2015), Reichs roars back with a Temperance Brennan mystery unlike any that have come before it. The forensic anthropologist has recently discovered that she has a cerebral aneurysm; the diagnosis, not to mention the surgery to ensure the aneurysm won't rupture and kill her, has taken its toll on her emotionally and professionally. When Brennan receives (from an unknown sender) pictures of a dead man, she assumes she will be called in to consult on the case when the man's body turns up. But her new boss, an ambitious and hateful woman?whose competence in her field, in Brennan's mind, is very much open to question?shuts her out. Faithful readers won't be surprised to hear that Brennan teams up with her longtime investigative partner, Detective Skinny Slidell, to find out who the dead man is and who sent Tempe the photos. Mysteries pile up, answers lead to further questions, and soon Brennan has uncovered a nasty conspiracy. Or has she? One of the book's central themes is Brennan's lack of confidence in her own mind: could she be imagining connections between unrelated facts? The novel shows us a more vulnerable side of Brennan, and Reichs' writing style is subtly different, too, as though she were trying to make us feel ever so slightly off-kilter. A complete success.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)