Bones to Ashes

[Lesa Holstine]

Kathy Reichs' tenth novel, Bones to Ashes, takes forensic anthropologist Temperance "Tempe" Brennan into her own past. It's a troubling, but fascinating, examination of Tempe's troubled childhood, and that of other young women who lost their innocence, childhoods, and sometimes, their lives.

Following her brother and father's deaths, Tempe's mother moves the small family from Chicago to Charleston. Summering on Pawleys Island the summer she turned eight, the lonely young girl met Évangéline Landry. The two became friends, sharing poetry, childhood, and Évangéline's stories of L'Acadia, her home in New Brunswick. When Évangéline mysteriously disappeared two years later, a devastated and puzzled Tempe spent two summers trying to find her.

Almost forty years later, Tempe still sees her friend in the corpses of teenage girls. She's just returned to her job in Quebec when she's thrown into two cases involving the bones of girls. Hippo, a Sergeant on the Cold Case squad, sends her bones that had been in a policeman's officer. And, Lieutenant-Detective Andrew Ryan, a homicide officer, is haunted by six missing girls. Three of those bodies have been found near water. It's Tempe's job to tell the stories of those bodies, bodies that remind of her Évangéline.

Tempe reaches the point where she hates her job, her life, and the world. However, she's obsessed with the past, and is determined to dig out the truth. Tempe's search for Évangéline leads to an unexpected story about the people of Acadia, and complications in the cases of the missing girls.

Ten years ago, I put aside Deja Dead, Reichs' first book. There was too much French language, and too many technical details. Over time, Reichs has learned to easily explain the French to those of us who don't read it. Bones to Ashes flows easily in both languages. However, there is still too much technical jargon. Every scientific expert in the book is too wordy, and given to explaining every bit of research they did on the way to a discovery.

Bones to Ashes is a complicated examination of a troubling period in the medical history of Acadia and Canada. And, it's a somber look at the world of missing girls. Those girls who went missing had lives as troubled as Tempe's and Évangéline's. Somewhere inside, Tempe realizes she could have been one of those girls, and she worries that Évangéline became one of them. Bones to Ashes will continue to haunt the reader long after it's finished, in the same way that the stories will haunt Tempe Brennan.

Kathy Reichs' website is www.kathyreichs.com

Bones to Ashes by Kathy Reichs. Scribner, ©2007. ISBN 978-0-7432-9437-9 (hardcover), 320p.