AdaDavis's Full Review: Jefferson Bass, William M. Bass, Jon Jefferson - C...
I picked up the hunting knife with my left hand and tested its heft, then shifted it to my right hand to compare. I'm a lefty, but I grade papers and dial phone numbers with my right. The knife felt more at home there, too. Okay, I thought, add "stabbing" to the list of right hand activities.
Dr. Bill Brockton is a 50-something Professor of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee, where he has taught for more than 30 years. Two years after the loss of his wife to cancer, Bill is still in mourning and has no social life. He has one son - an accountant, who he seldom sees. All of this should add up to a very boring life except for one thing: Bill Brockton is the founder and manager of the University's Anthropology Research Facility, better know as "The Body Farm." On (and under) three acres of wooded land in Knoxville, forensic anthropologists and law enforcement agencies learn the answers to questions about human decomposition. As Dr. Brockton says: "Unlike some of my colleagues, I don't care which name people use. To paraphrase Shakespeare, a Body Farm by any other name would still stink."
In addition to his teaching duties and oversight of the Body Farm, Dr. Brockton acts as a consultant for the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation on murder cases. One such case takes him into Cooke County, Tennessee, where a body has been found in a deep cave under the Great Smokey Mountains. Preserved in the cold, damp cave for more than 30 years, the body of the unknown young woman shows signs of strangulation. An autopsy reveals another thing: she was several months pregnant when she was murdered. It's a case that won't be easy to solve in this area of Tennessee, where old family feuds and grudges go back for more than a hundred years. No one, it seems, wants to talk about this particular girl, or how she ended up dead in a cave in the early 1970's. In fact, someone is willing to go to great lengths to make sure the murderer is never identified.
Thoughts on the Book
This book was fun to read. Dr. Brockton is an interesting character and unlikely hero. It's a murder mystery that kept me interested to the very end, even though it meandered through a variety of "side trips" on the way to solving this particular murder. (Some of those "side trips," however, turned out to be important to the case.) The forensic work described is both graphic and authentic - and perhaps best skipped by the squeamish. This is definitely not a book you want to read while eating! I learned more than I ever really wanted to know about odd uses for bleach, meat tenderizer, and fabric softeners.
Unlike most murder mysteries, this one kept me snickering all of the way through it. Dr. Brockton has the usual run of students, and some of them will try almost anything to get a good grade without doing the work required. He's also a professor, not a trained law enforcement officer. He doesn't own a gun, and isn't given to feats of heroics. He's an expert on bones, not the complex psychology and culture of the Tennessee backwoods, where people regard the law "more as a challenge than a code of conduct."
About the Author(s)
The author, Jefferson Bass, is a pseudonym used by a pair of authors: Jon Jefferson and Dr. Bill Bass. Jon Jefferson is a journalist and filmmaker who has made documentaries about the Body Farm. He also has numerous articles published in the New York Times, Newsweek, and Popular Science. Dr. Bass is the real-world equivalent of his fictional character, Dr. Brockton. He's a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee and the founder of the Body Farm. The authors previously collaborated on a book about the history of the Body Farm called Death's Acre. Carved in Bone is their first work of fiction. A second book, Flesh and Bone has just been published this year, with, hopefully, more to come.
Dr. Bass says about this book: "Some novels are pure fiction; others are fiction that are built on a foundation of facts. This book is of the latter type. Although the story is fictional, the science is factual, and some of the places and events described here contain a sizable kernel of reality. Many of the real-world forensics cases my graduate students and I have examined during the past thirty-five years have occurred in East Tennessee, where this story is based. It would be impossible (or at least foolish) to write a story that was not shaped and colored by those experiences."
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