As is her wont, forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan has once again stumbled upon a mysterious cache of bones - this time, her corpse-happy pooch turned up a brace of plastic bags filled with decomposed remains while at an acquaintance's backyard barbecue. Her inspection, though, finds the bones to be ursine - bear bones.

All, that is, except for two stray hand bones from a human. But two is more than enough to set an investigation in motion, and so Tempe is off like a shot. A search of the abandoned farm where the bags were found turns up enough bones to make a human head and hands - which leads Tempe and company on a merry search for records of a headless, handless corpse. As luck would have it, one turns up a state away.

With bear bones galore and a handful of rare bird feathers also found at the farm, the investigators suspect that they've stumbled onto a smuggling ring dealing in endangered species - bear galls for Asian medicaments, rare birds for collectors. Their suspicion is heightened when a putative drug smuggler's plane crashes nearby bearing not a cargo of cocaine, but of a rare local herb.


Bear Bones, Bare Brennan

While Tempe toils in the lab - and at playing amateur detective - her sometime love interest Ryan has arrived in town for a long-anticipated consensual interlude, replete with Victoria's Secret knockoffs. Ryan must shift from lover to bodyguard, though, when Tempe becomes the target of a sinister email and digital camera stalker. As she bumbles toward the final clue that will uncover the evildoers, Tempe disregards her personal safety and - as usual - wanders into the midst of trouble while playing detective. Incautious and clueless, Tempe still manages to defy death and close the case in her usual manner - by accident. At least she and Ryan get to do the horizontal boogie a time or six...


More Brennan

Back from a decidedly non-vacation trip to Guatemala (last year's Grave Secrets), Dr. Temperance Brennan is spending a sweltering August in Charlotte - one wonders why she can't manage to arrange summer in Montreal and winter in North Carolina, instead of the reverse. In fact, she hasn't been up north for two books, not since Deadly Decisions (Fatal Voyage was set in the Smoky Mountains). Be that as it may, author Kathy Reichs (like her character, a forensic anthropologist) is up to the rest of her usual tricks.

While the characters of Brennan, Ryan, et al., are well constructed and likeably complex, Reichs as always needs to devote more attention to her plotting. Too many disparate plot threads in Bare Bones are tied together via pure coincidence. Starting by searching for the missing daughter of an acquaintance, Brennan hopscotches to the bags of bones at a party her daughter drags her to, then gets called to look at the remains in the plane crash, and so on. And wouldn't you just know it, the rural farmhouse where the bear bones were found just happens to be connected to the teenaged girl she was seeking in Chapter One. Just as Angela Lansbury's character in "Murder, She Wrote" was a walking murder magnet, Brennan seems to trip over bones wherever she goes. Hmmm, that seems to lack grounding in reality.

Too, as do many writers Reichs tends to grab at a theme and drag it kicking and screaming throughout her book. As Lisa Scottoline's characters declaimed "make a mental note" ad nauseam in Courting Trouble, Reichs has Brennan and her twenty-something daughter Katy performing eye rolls more often than Al Gore at a presidential debate. Give Tempe's tired eyes - and more to the point, mine - a rest, Kathy...


Politics As Usual

Reichs usually works to inform her readers and advance a new cause with each book. The flavor of the month for Bare Bones is trafficking in endangered species - rhino horns, sea tortoises, and the less "showy" goods like the herb goldenseal. One of Tempe's consultants declaims that this business worth several billion dollars annually. The business is third only to the smuggling of illegal arms and illicit drugs, and the penalties are far less severe than the more lucrative drug and arms trades. Oddly enough, I heard an identical statement in an NPR/National Geographic production within four hours after I read that passage.

I'm with you on that, Kathy!


Previously reviewed items mentioned in text:

Fatal Voyage by Kathy Reichs
Courting Trouble by Lisa Scottoline



Recommended: Yes