Customer Reviews

Bones to Ashes: A Novel (Temperance Brennan Novels)

5 star:		(44)
4 star:		(27)
3 star:		(26)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

Tempe Brennan's back in her tenth mystery. For those not in the know, Dr. Temperance Brennan is a forensic anthropologist who divides her time between Québec and North Carolina. No stranger to personal trouble, she's an ex-alcoholic and single mother assigned to gruesome, personally dangerous cold cases. This time, Tempe's on the trail of her vanished childhood friend Évangéline Landry, a young Acadian who summered at Pawleys Island back when Tempe was a child. Tempe and Évangéline would spend the summers creating poetry and staging dramas as Évangéline shared her love of Longfellow's epic namesake poem (his Évangéline included a romanticized account of the Acadian deportation and its aftermath). One day, Évangéline Landry vanished without a trace, and for thirty years Tempe has longed to know what happened to her.

One of Tempe's coworkers in Québec wants her to look at a skeleton uncovered in New Brunswick, and Tempe starts to put together pieces that point to Évangéline. She is consumed with uncovering the truth behind her friend's disappearance at her own personal risk. As with previous novels, Reichs does her homework well. Acadia was an area of Eastern Canada originally settled by the French, who were later forcefully evicted by the British. Many exiled Acadians fled to Louisiana, where the name "Acadian" shortened to "Cajun." Next to Québec, New Brunswick has the largest percentage of Francophones in Canada (35% of the province is French-speaking).

Tempe's quest takes her to the small town of Tracadie-Sheila, New Brunswick. I admit, I was curious in Reichs' choice of town, because one of my favorite Francophone pop artists, Jean-François Breau, (Expose) is from Tracadie-Sheila, as is Star Académie winner Wilfred Bouthillier. One reason I love Reichs' books is because I lived in Québec and majored in Québec Studies, and she effortlessly manages to work in in-the-know elements of modern Quebecois culture. No mention of Breau or Wilfred, but Garou's Seul makes an appearance (in the first Temperance Brennan novel Déjà Dead, it was Roch Voisine's Helene).

Tempe's on-again, off-again romance with Detective Ryan is definitely off-again here. Ryan has his hands full with cold cases and personal problems, and although the two consult each other, there's precious little romantic involvement this time around. However, the vibrant cast of supporting characters fills the void.

As usual, there are dark subject matters here that may offend some, including post mortems and torture, exploitation and rape of minors, so consider yourself warned. The dialogue is witty and balanced, the pacing generally impeccable, although the ending seemed a tad rushed. Unlike some of the past few Tempe novels, I felt that this was an excellent effort that was truer in spirit to some of the first few Reichs novels. It generally doesn't stray from the realm of believability, and Reichs' expertise as a forensic anthropologist and her experiences living in Québec lend Tempe an unshakable credibility.

It's interesting how memories of our childhoods can sometimes remain with us throughout our lives or suddenly return to us as vividly as yesterday's events. Recollections may gladden or sadden. For forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan memories of summer days spent with her best friend, Evangeline Landry, confounded and distressed.

Some 30 years ago when Tempe was eight she met Evangeline and thought her to be "the smartest and most exotic being I would ever know. She was beautiful in a dark gypsy way, spoke a foreign language, knew songs and poems I never heard. But, even then, despite the sharing of secrets, I sensed a reserve in my new friend, a mystery."

Nonetheless, those summers spent together were halcyon days as Evangeline introduced Tempe to poetry, told her about Acadian history, and of a longing to be a poet. Tempe dreamed of becoming a veterinarian so together they kept notebooks, recording the wild life they encountered. Then, quite suddenly, it all ended. That was the day they had planned to go crabbing but Evangeline along with her mother and sister had disappeared. When Tempe went to her house she was told to go away and not return, plus given an ominous warning - they were dangerous.

Of course, Tempe wrote numerous letters and searched but all to no avail. Now, three decades later she is confronted with the skeleton of an adolescent girl found in Acadia. She cannot help but wonder if these are the remains of her friend.

Tempe's partner and on-again, off-again lover Detective Lieutenant Andrew Ryan is working on cold cases all involving missing teenage girls. Is there any connection between the Acadian skeleton and the missing girls?

Eventually, Tempe is able to trace Evangeline's sister, Obeline, who claimed that Evangeline had been murdered long ago. However, linguistic fingerprints don't lie.

With unflagging attention to detail and punchy dialogue Reichs has penned the tenth in her Temperance Brennan series - may there be as many more.

- Gail Cooke

The latest Tempe Brennan mystery is well written and moderately exciting. The last Tempe mystery, Break No Bones, was set in USA, so in this one, we are back in Canada. Before going there, we head down memory lane, because the story begins with Tempe looking back at her childhood summers, where she met the two year older French girl Evangeline. For the next years, each summer Tempe and Evangeline spent their summers together, until the summer where Evangeline and her sister Obeline disappears without a trace. Tempe and her sister Harry tries finding out what happened, but no one are willing to talk, and soon their Nacy Drew-investigations stop, and they forget all about it.

That is, Tempe hasn't forgotten. From time to time she remembers and speculates. Memories float to the surface again when an old skeleton lands on her desk. She is asked to find out about it from cold case investigator Hippo, and pretty soon she suspects that the skeleton could be the skeleton of her long lost friend Evangeline. The skeleton comes from the same area as Evangeline, and Tempe gets more and more convinced, that it is the skeleton of her friend.

But Tempe, Hippo and on again/off again boyfriend Ryan has other, more pressing matters at hand, even though some of these cases are cold cases. In between speculating about Evangeline,the skeleton, the cold cases and her relationship with Ryan, Tempe's sister, the flamboyant Harry, announces her arrival. She is soon entangled in the mystery of the old skeleton, and soon some of the cold cases can be linked with Evangeline's disapperance.

Bones to Ashes is good, easy reading and a must for Tempe Brennan-fans, but this one was not as exciting as the last one. Still lightyears better than Cross Bones, which has to be Kathy Reich's worst Tempe Brennan book to date.

This is the 10th novel in a series, but the first one that I have read. Consequently, I was not biased by other novels in the series and judged the novel on its own merits. It reads well as a stand alone novel. Temperance Brennan is a forensic anthropologist employed by the police in Montreal Canada. As a child, she spent her summers at the seashore in North Carolina. A childhood friend was a slightly older girl from Canada who spent summers with an aunt and uncle. One summer the friend was suddenly rushed away without saying goodbye. The aunt and uncle implied something bad, but would not provide details. All contact was cut off.

Now Temperance is investigating human remains in Montreal, and her investigations turn up the skeleton of an unidentifed teenaged girl from the area where her friend had lived. Could it be the remains of her childhood friend?

The investigations reveal both family secrets and a very bad criminal activity. There are suspects, but some very surprising revelations. There are some young women injured by their families either deliberately or through negligence, and predators prowling in the dark. There is some discussion of social phobias, distrust of authorities, etc., especially in insulated communities that have suffered wrongs in the past.

Some readers have noted that scenes in the novel can be a little gruesome. It does give somewhat detailed descriptions of autopsies in the morgue. The author is a forensic anthropologist, as is the main character in the novel.

I've made no bones (no pun intended) that Kathy Reichs has permanently replaced Cornwell as my writer-of-choice when it comes to forensic anthropology novels. Her latest, Bones To Ashes, continues to entertain me, although this one seemed to be a bit slow coming out of the blocks. What I thought was going to be a "time-out" for a character development story picked up at the end and delivered a pretty tight finish.

Temperance Brennan is drawn into a case of skeletal identification that seemingly is a bit too close to home for her. She had a childhood friend named Evangeline who disappeared one year with no explanation as to what happened. Tempe's attempts to discover her whereabouts were met with silence and warnings to just let her go. Thirty years have passed, but Tempe hasn't forgotten her. Tempe's Montreal cop boyfriend is investigating a number of cold cases where either a young girl went missing and was never found, or they found a skeleton that was never identified. The timeframes and locations are such that Tempe can't help wondering if perhaps the skeleton on her table is her missing friend. The odds are one in a million, but they start getting narrower once Tempe and Ryan start digging into the past. Even though everyone's claiming the past is over and forgotten, some people are a bit too intent on keeping Tempe and Ryan from finding that out for themselves. And if those people are involved in any way with Evangeline's disappearance, that could mean that she ended her life in a very unpleasant and sordid fashion...

The start of the novel looked like it was going to be a diversion into Brennan's childhood as well as what I call a character development installment. Those are the books in a series that seem to lack some of the action that the author is known for, but that serve to add some additional background and color to the characters. It wasn't until Ryan's cold case efforts started intersecting with Brennan's work that the action angle started to pick up. The bad guys in the plot are truly nasty characters, but there are some interesting twists at the end that force you to re-examine your impressions. We're still not talking boy scouts, but there's some humanity there after all.

Bones to Ashes isn't the absolute best book in the series, but it's still a solid read. And any slowness at the start is more than made up for at the end...

In "Bones to Ashes," Kathy Reichs brings back forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan, who reveals some intriguing details about her childhood. Her family lived in Chicago's South Side but later settled in Charlotte, North Carolina. At the age of eight, Tempe met and befriended Evangeline Landry, an exotic Acadian girl who spoke fluent French and shared Tempe's love of literature. Four years later, Evangeline disappeared without warning and Tempe never saw her again.

Fast forward to the present. Tempe is up to her ears in work between her responsibilities in North Carolina and in Quebec, where she works part-time in the crime and medico-legal lab. The lab's director, Pierre LaManche, dumps a whole slew of cases in Tempe's lap, including one dealing with the badly decomposed body of a female dredged from a lake. Adding to her burden, Tempe gets a call from Hippolyte Gallant (Hippo), who works in the cold case squad; he also has some old bones for Tempe to evaluate.

As usual with Reichs, the science is superb. The author provides a thorough primer in human decomposition, with specifics about the processes of putrefaction, mummification, and saponification (Yuch!). We look over Tempe's shoulder as she cleans, x-rays, and measures the bodies, studying them for the presence of insects, tissue dehydration, foreign objects, signs of violence or illness, and other clues. To clean cadavers, Tempe sometimes "cooks" them using a boiling tank and enzyme detergent. If corpses are your bag, you'll love this book.

Unfortunately, "Bones to Ashes" offers little else, especially for readers who crave character development and compelling story lines. Homicide detective Andrew Ryan, Tempe's erstwhile lover, is pulling away from Tempe (he is preoccupied with his troubled daughter) and he plays a bit part in this installment. The rest of the novel touches on spousal and child abuse, the plight of the Acadians (who were persecuted by the British), and dark family secrets that lead to tragic outcomes. None of these threads is particularly compelling, and a subplot that has Tempe's flighty sister, Harry, suddenly showing up and playing Nancy Drew, is both superfluous and irritating. In addition, the villains are one-dimensional, the dialogue is stilted, and the convoluted mystery generates little suspense. It may be time for Reichs to start a new series or perhaps try a stand-alone thriller.

Bones to Ashes reaches back to roots in Longfellow's poem, Evangeline, and Dr. Temperance Brennan's childhood to solve an old mystery, whatever happened to Tempe's missing Acadian friends, Evangeline and Obeline. To do so, literary analysis, forensic anthropology, breaking encryptions, and diatomic sampling will be required.

As the book opens, you are carried back to Tempe's youth and her friendship with Evangeline and Obeline. Quickly, the book returns to the present as Tempe returns to work in Montreal to find a backlog of bones to examine. At that, Hippolyte Gallant who works on cold cases persuades her to look at one more set: some bones sitting in a police station that don't interest the local coroner. That set fascinates Tempe because it seems to be from a girl about Evangeline's age when she disappeared. Could this be Evangeline? That concern leads Tempe to investigate with her sister Harry's help into what happened to Evangeline.

Meanwhile, Andrew Ryan, Tempe's estranged lover, is working on a floater who may be linked to three missing persons and two unidentified bodies. Could there be a serial killer involved? Bit by bit, Tempe and Ryan connect the dots in unexpected ways. Will they reconnect personally? Ryan is pretty busy taking care of his junkie daughter and is put off by having seen Tempe's husband put his arms around Tempe. But at least they still share a cockatiel, Charlie, who provides some of the humor in the story.

As usual, the science is wonderful and five star in this book. As occurred with Break No Bones, the story and the rest of the writing creak in several ways that are hard to discuss without giving away the plot. The main weaknesses show up in these areas:

1. The Tempe-Ryan relationship seemed artificial and didn't ring true to me.

2. Harry's behavior and language were way over the top for me. Once again, it didn't ring true in several places.

3. The solution to Evangeline's disappearance is tied in part to a way of thinking that seems more than a little unlikely. I didn't buy it.

4. Basic facts about the suspects are poorly investigated. It seemed uncharacteristically sloppy for these characters.

The ties to Acadia are poetic and appropriate. That part of the story worked well.

If you are a big fan of the series, you'll probably think this is not one of the strongest stories. But you'll be glad you read it. Learning more about Tempe's childhood makes the story memorable for fans of Dr. Reichs' writing.

This is another hit by prolific author Kathy Reichs featuring her forensic anthropologist, Tempe Brennen.

In this book, we see a glimpse into Tempe's past and her relationship with a friend who was an Acadian from Canada. The two lost contact when Tempe was a child, and she put the past into the recesses of her mind, until a child's skeleton is brought to her lab in Montreal. She begins to suspect the skeleton is that of her long-lost friend.

Along with this storyline is the search for a serial killer by Tempe's sometimes boyfriend, Det. Ryan. These two have been dancing around each other for many books. In a recent book, it appeared that Tempe might get back with her estranged husband in South Carolina, and in this book it appears that Ryan may get back with his daughter's mother.

We are left with more questions than answers at the end of the book.

There are clues to every situation, and the final outcome is not what one would have expected.

This was not as forensically detailed as some of the other books in the series, nor was it as much of a hunt for the killers as it was a tying up of memories and looking at one's life.

I feel changes are coming for Tempe. I just don't know what.

very different from the TV series...
enjoying books very much, but cannot
compare novels' characters to those
portrayed in show--(apples to oranges)
the entertainment value of the TV
series is greater, but writing of
books is well done, worth reading.

this was a shocker because I watch the show bones and had never read a book by Kathy. It was a great book but dont expect the characters to be anything like the show. good smooth read.