Brennan Gets Hot and Cold Cases This Time, but Bones Never Lie

Bones Never Lie - Kathy Reichs

The case started like cases often do for Temperance Brennan: a phone call asking her to consult on an old case, a file of autopsy results and an earnest cop from a distant jurisdiction. But in this case, the victim was known: so why call in one of the country’s leading forensic anthropologists? It was the DNA: trace evidence with a DNA match to a long-ago case Brennan had worked in Montreal, a case she’d worked with Ryan. Ryan, the man who had cracked the Anique Pomerlau case, the homicide lieutenant gone missing lo, these many months.

Emily Deschanel, TV's Temperance Brennan from"Bones"
[Gabe Skidmore, wikimedia commons]

They didn’t want Brennan, they wanted Ryan – and they figured she could find him and he could find Pomerlau. Brennan didn’t think she could, but a new case in her own back yard made matters more urgent: the MO fit Pomerlau’s style, and Brennan’s research suggested that it was not the first time the woman had plied her evil trade in Charlotte… and so she jumped on a plane to fetch her sometime partner, sometime lover.

The trail led them back to Montreal where they reopened the files on the Pomerlau case; and then to Vermont whence the earnest detective with the damning DNA match had come a-visiting. Brennan did what Brennan does: she puzzled through the mystery and, in the process, got herself in deep doo-doo. 

What: you expected different?

Bones Never Lie is the seventeenth or perhaps sixteenth installment in the Temperance Brennan series by Kathy Reichs, like her protagonist a North Carolina-based forensic anthropologist. The novels are the basis for the long-running Fox televistion drama “Bones” (for which Reichs gives a shameless plug at one point in the novel).  Like some earlier Brennan novels (Bones to Ashes, Deadly Decisions), Bones Never Lie finds Brennan shuttling back and forth between Charlotte and Montreal. While in earlier novels rationale for the dual locations was skimpy, this time it’s fairly well thought out. Reichs also pulls in Ryan, whose presence has been slim to none of recent. Naturally, the relationship is strained by Ryan’s even more than normal moodiness (understandable given the recent death of his only child). With Brennan’s daughter Katy out of the picture (serving in Afghanistan), the role of family genius falls instead to Brennan’s mother “Daisy” – a sort of silver-coifed tech savant (though she starts off with a pretty major boo-boo) who cracks several important clues. Guess the literary Brennan needs Hodgins and company after all.

As mysteries go, Bones Never Lie is pretty much mediocre: I tumbled to the critical plot point less than halfway through the text (p. 250 of 602). Reichs also had to invoke a rather unusual medical condition to obfuscate the evidence, which is – frankly – cheating.  For the final showdown, Brennan’s inevitable half-cocked charge after the villain owes its lack of backup to an extraordinarily contrived plot device. 

And over it all, there’s Reichs’ somewhat irritating habit of writing her text in strings of sentence fragments, apparently a lame attempt to introduce urgency:

I could hear my breath in the quiet of the car. Blood pounding in my ears.

I stood for a moment studying the scene. The algae-coated brick. The rusty fence and awnings. The stunted concrete slabs.

Nothing moved but the rain. Which was falling harder now, drumming a tattoo on the car hood and roof. 

No, not the greatest writing and not the greatest mystery – not even the best out of Reichs. It’ll probably sell a million, though, especially once the romantic mystery fans get a load of the real climactic scene…