The secrets of the dead are in her hands. The bones of three young women are unearthed in the basement of a Montreal pizza parlor, and forensic anthropologist Tempe Brennan has unsolved murder on her mind as she examines the shallowly buried remains. Coming up against a homicide cop who is convinced the dead have been entombed on the site for centuries, Tempe perseveres, even with her own relationship with Detective Andrew Ryan at a delicate turning point. In the lab, the clean, well-perserved bones offer few clues. But when Carbon 14 confirms her hunch that these were recent deaths despite the antique buttons found near the bodies, Tempe's probing must produce answers quickly to stop a killer whose grisly handiwork has seen the light of day.
In
Monday Mourning Tempe Brennan finds the bones of three dead adolescents in a basement and she has to convince her police colleagues that they are recent enough that the case should be investigated. The book has all the technical know-how, crisply explained, that we expect from Kathy Reichs; readers find themselves peering over Tempe's shoulder as she works out, not only the solution to a puzzle, but how to begin to solve it.
Reichs is a practising forensic archaeologist in real life--but she never forgets that her readers cannot be expected to know everything she does. For a genuine expert though, she is remarkably unpatronising to our ignorance--one of the reasons why Tempe has so many colleagues who know comparatively little is so that her explanations can instruct us while we watch prickly Tempe tread on colleagues' toes. Like all of Reichs' books, Monday Mourning has a pronounced sense of place--Montreal in the snow has rarely seemed so real. If there is a downside to this clever police procedural, it is that we get rather too much of Tempe's fairly conventional emotional life--apparent problems with her lover Ryan end up in quite the corniest of explanations for apparent individuality, while her concern for an apparently suicidal friend adds artificial suspense to a plot that was doing the whole thing quite well in the first place. --Roz Kaveney
