AdaDavis's Full Review: Jefferson Bass - Flesh and Bone: A Body Farm Novel
"Over the past twenty-five years, my graduate students and I had staged hundreds of human bodies in various settings and scenarios to study their postmortem decay. Shallow graves, deep graves, watery graves, concrete-capped graves. Air-conditioned buildings, heated buildings, screened-in porches. Automobile trunks, backseats, travel trailers. Naked bodies, cotton-clad bodies, polyester-suited bodies, plastic-wrapped bodies. But I'd never thought to stage anything like the gruesome death scene Miranda and I were about to recreate for Jess Carter."
Dr. Bill Brockton, Professor of Anthropology and founder of the Body Farm, is used to seeing murder scenes. In fact, one of the purposes of the Farm is to recreate crime scenes to study the interaction of flora, fauna and weather on human bodies. This case, though, is particularly lurid. The body had been in the woods for a while and the state of decay made it hard to determine the time of death. Since the male victim was dressed in female clothing and exhibited signs of having been tortured, the murder had the appearance of a hate crime. Using a donated human body of roughly the same size and weight, Dr. Brockton and his students recreate the crime scene at the Body Farm. Things take an odd turn when another murder victim turns up, and the evidence points to Dr. Brockton as the prime suspect.
Thoughts on the Book:
This book is a sequel to Carved in Bone, but stands on its own quite well. Like the first book, this one contains a lot of forensic detail best skipped by the squeamish. Dr. Brockton is an interesting character who doesn't fit the usual mold of crime scene investigators. He's a forensic anthropologist - a scientist - not a homicide investigator. His primary job is teaching Anthropology at the University of Tennessee, where his graduate students use the Body Farm as a "laboratory" of sorts. He thinks like a scientist and is comfortable with decaying human bodies, but is often baffled by the behavior of living humans. This leads to some humorous turns of events - like being sued by a Creationist religious group for teaching evolution in his classes - as well as some odd plot twists.
As "whodunits" go, this book is quite good. Except for an early section where the author seems to be lecturing to the reader, the book is well paced and easy to read, with enough twists and turns to keep it interesting. It's unusual to find a murder mystery with both graphic crime scene detail and humor, but this pair of authors managed it well. While I did figure out the "whodunits" a bit ahead of the investigators on the cases, the plot kept my interest to the end.
The Authors
"Jefferson Bass" is a pen name used by journalist Jon Jefferson working with Forensic Anthropologist Dr. William Bass. Dr. Bass is the real founder of the University of Tennessee's Anthropology Research Facility, know as "The Body Farm." This is their second novel. They also collaborated on a non-fiction book about the Body Farm called Death's Acre.
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