February 1, 2021
Two plastic- and wire-wrapped bodies are discovered in a medical waste container on a South Carolina beach, recalling a case forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan dealt with 15 years ago in Quebec. What's more, the bodies also seem linked to a contagion devastating Charleston. With a 125,000-copy first printing and (pandemic willing) a six-city tour.
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May 17, 2021
The coroner of South Carolina’s Charleston County needs Temperance Brennan’s help in bestseller Reichs’s average 20th thriller featuring the forensic anthropologist (after 2020’s A Conspiracy of Bones). The coroner knows Brennan, who specializes in analyzing “remains unfit for a pathologist’s scalpel: the decomposed, dismembered, burned, mummified, mutilated, and skeletal,” happens to be headed from North Carolina to Charleston. A recent hurricane has tossed ashore a container with two decayed bodies inside wrapped in plastic secured by electrical wire, and at least one of the bodies shows evidence of a bullet to the head. These details rattle Brennan, as they match those of a 15-year-old unsolved case involving two victims that Brennan worked on with Andrew Ryan, a former Quebec homicide detective turned PI, who’s her current significant other. The new victims spur Brennan to labor to identify the killer or killers of all four people. Reichs’s tendency to end chapters with ominous foreshadowing (“Unaware that the storm damage would be nothing compared to that triggered by an upcoming call”) gets old quickly. Despite that, this is an accessible entry point for newcomers.
August 15, 2021
An unsettling discovery brought to light by Hurricane Inara points forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan back toward two murder victims she failed to win justice for in Quebec many years ago. Passing through North Carolina, the storm tosses ashore a container that's been the final resting place of two dead bodies. Apart from their gender and age (one a teenager, the other a few years older), the women are essentially unidentifiable. But the mystery of their deaths isn't nearly as troubling to Tempe as the memory they evoke of a remarkably similar case--two anonymous women who were shot to death, wrapped in plastic, and sunk in a box in a river--that she worked with her love interest, detective Lt. Andrew Ryan, in Quebec some 15 years ago. Recalling a recent inquiry she fielded from Polly Beecroft about the disappearance of her great-aunt from Paris in 1888, Tempe is tormented by a question about the victims she left behind in Quebec: "Why had no one kept searching for them?" As usual in this venerable franchise, the forensics are grimly detailed, the cliffhanger chapter endings nonstop, and the range of incidents competing for attention with the issues the newest remains have thrown into the spotlight dizzying. What's most likely to linger long after Tempe unearths the monstrously timely medical conspiracy that links all the victims is the heroine's selfless dedication to honoring the dead by connecting them to names and faces and stories. Seasoned readers won't be put off by the whopping, and highly ironic, coincidence at the heart of Tempe's investigation. Comfort food for fans who are far past the point of being easily shocked.
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