Continuing the Kathy Reichs Quest

Long work hours and lots of family gatherings have stopped me from talking about books individually for the past week, but my reading has primarily consisted of Kathy Reichs and her heroine Tempe Brennan.

Last weekend I read the excellent but almost-too-disturbing-to-finish Monday Mourning. Tempe is back in Montreal for this installment of the Bones-inspiring series. When three sets of bones are found buried in a pizza parlor basement, police are convinced they date to the nineteenth century when the building was built. Tempe has other thoughts on the matter, and she digs until a pattern of missing girls over a series of years emerges. The dark truth revealed in the last few pages caused me to scan rather than read. I wanted to learn what happened, but the details were too much for me (especially right before turning out the light to go to sleep!). Reichs touches on a dark topic in the end which crossed a line I wasn't prepared to cross in my reading for entertainment.

Next in chronological order was Reichs' Cross Bones. This is a Da Vinci Code-esque novel that addresses the sale of religious antiquities in relation to the death of an Orthodox Jewish man who made his living selling such items. Another theme in the novel is the discovery of several different locations anthropologists and religious experts claim as Jesus's tomb. Although the novel didn't appeal to me with its topic, I love Tempe and so I tried it anyway. I abandoned it a third of the way into the book. The focus on religion and ancient burial sites (and whether something like that could even be proven), as well as Tempe's traveling to Israel wasn't something I was interested in. I'm sure many readers loved The Da Vinci Code and would enjoy this novel; I'm not one of them. So as much as I hate to admit it, my Reichs quest was somewhat interrupted by my decision to not finish the book.

In order to jump right back on the horse and into the saddle, I started Break No Bones. The novel is set in South Carolina's low country and in the city of Charleston. A southern novel, so I was destined to like it from the beginning. While conducting a student dig on an outlying island, Tempe discovers a newly buried body among the ancient bones of the Indian burial site. Tempe's friend Emma is the coroner in Charleston, so Tempe is asked to help with the investigation despite being out of her jurisdiction. When bodies continue to pile up, Tempe gets help from both her estranged husband Pete and her love interest Andrew Ryan. The three of them find themselves staying at Tempe's friend Anne's beach house, which makes for interesting scenes in Tempe's personal life.

I've recently been on an audiobook kick after reading a blogpost about how to join tracks on discs together and transfer those to my iPod to make listening in the car, while running, or even while doing chores around the house more enjoyable. More on the titles I've been listening to later!