The 23rd Book in a Series!
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You have to respect author, Kathy Reichs. From her bio on Goodreads, we learn she is a forensic anthropologist with a Ph.D. from Northwestern. She works for the Medical Examiner in the state of North Carolina and for a similar agency in Quebec. She is certified by the American Board of Forensic Anthropology, which is impressive because only fifty people have reached such certification. Beyond working as a medical examiner, she is also a professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina.
As if this is not enough, she has written about her work by creating a fictional forensic anthropologist named Temperance Brennan. Indeed, she has written an entire series about “Tempe” Brennan. Fire and Bones is the 23rd book in the series! And if that is not enough, using her work experience and all those books, she is also the producer of the successful TV show, Bones.
Kathy Reichs’ many loyal fans will be appalled to hear this is the first book of hers I have read. I thank her publicist, JRB Communications (LLC for Scribner), for sending me a review copy, and in the process creating a new fan.
Here is the basic storyline for this mystery: Tempe’s daughter, Katy, calls and asks her to be interviewed by her friend, Ivy Doyle. Katy reminds Tempe that Ivy is a reporter who was embedded with Katy’s unit during her second deployment to Afghanistan. (Of course, such comments skillfully explain things to new readers of the series.)
Ivy works for a television news station in Washington DC and is covering a recent fire. She wants to pick Tempe’s brain on how a fire scene is processed. When the interview is shown, Tempe gets another call. This one is from Dr. Jada Thacker. Thacker is the interim medical examiner in DC and is handling the deaths that occurred in the fire. She needs Tempe’s expert skills and asks her to come to DC.
Of course, Tempe is soon on her way! But oh my, because it is Memorial Day weekend and there is a World Pride event taking place, no hotel rooms are available putting Tempe at Ivy’s house as a guest. This proves to be good and bad. It would be a spoiler to tell you why it was bad, but let me tell you about the good side…
As Tempe visits the scene of the fire (it’s in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood), four bodies are recovered from the recent blaze. But then, Tempe and the police investigators find a hidden room, a sub cellar, under the building and another body there. This person, however, died long before the fire.
Thus, we have two crimes to investigate, decades old and days old.
For the older crime in particular, staying at Ivy’s house comes in handy. Ivy is an investigative journalist and turns up the history of the area. Thus we learn that in the 1930s and 40s, the building was the hangout for a group of bootleggers and racketeers known as the Foggy Bottom Gang. By the way, such a group really existed, turning this mystery into historical fiction. At any rate, whenever Tempe has downtime, she reads more of the information Ivy has dug up as she tries to learn the identity and circumstances of death of the sub cellar victim.
For the newer crime, the police are more involved. As Tempe works with them, we get to know the four people who died in the fire. We get to examine their backgrounds to see if any of them had enemies. But we never let go of that information about the Foggy Bottom Gang and of course, before long, the two mysteries overlap.
One of the reasons I don’t read a lot of mysteries is that my brain gets lost in all the twists and turns. Lucky for me, Tempe had a boyfriend in this novel, Ryan. Since he had been away during this investigation, the author takes the last chapter before the epilogue for Tempe to tell Ryan – in a very orderly fashion – everything there is to know!
I don’t know if all Temperance Brennan novels end this way – dotting all the I’s and crossing all the T’s – but I plan to read a couple more to find out!
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Click here to learn more about Fire and Bones on Amazon.
Want to know more historical information, look to The Foggy Bottom Gang.
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