Review: Vivien Horler
Fire and Bones – A Temperance Brennan novel, by Kathy Reichs (Simon & Schuster)
Old grudges can be hard to let go. And they can reverberate through the years, as this latest Tempe Brennan thriller explores.
This time her sidekick is not Ryan, the Canadian cop, but Ivy Doyle, a journalist and friend of Tempe’s daughter Katy.
Tempe is wary of journalists, telling Katy that “nothing good ever comes from talking to the press”.
But Katy owes Ivy a favour, and Ivy wants an interview with Tempe, the forensic anthropologist, because Ivy knows Tempe has experience in processing fire scenes containing dead people.
It turns out an old building – possibly an illegal Airbnb – in the Foggy Bottom area of Washington DC, is on fire, and there are suspicions that several people may have perished.
People like Tempe – and Kathy Reichs herself – are not pathologists, the people who perform post mortems to establish the cause of death. These procedures are done on bodies which are relatively intact. Forensic anthropologists are called in for trickier cases; bodies that are badly damaged or in an advanced state of decomposition, burnt or ruined by prolonged immersion under water.
Reichs knows her stuff. She has had distinguished career as a forensic anthropologist, giving evidence before the UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and being one of the experts who sifted through the debris for human remains after the attack on the Twin Towers.
As a favour to her daughter, Tempe does the interview with Ivy over Zoom, and then prepares to go away on a long-awaited break with Ryan.
But fate – well actually Jada Thacker, the medical examiner for the District of Columbia – has other ideas. It turns out Thacker watched Ivy’s interview, and now wants Tempe to come to Washington to examine the Foggy Bottom bodies.
Thacker tells Tempe the second and third floors of the building were a warren of rooms, some without windows, none with fire escapes. A long-term renter reports to the police there were at least four people sleeping in the upper stories when the fire broke out. They are still missing.
One is believed to be a 19-year-old Canadian woman, Skylar Reese Hill, who phoned 911 to report the fire, but was unable to flee her windowless room.
Thacker says she has listened to the recording, and the terror in the girl’s voice was heart-wrenching. She then begs Tempe to come to Washington and investigate.
Reluctantly Tempe agrees to abandon Ryan and go to nation’s capital.
After the building cools and Tempe and the police can enter, they find the four bodies. A surprise is a fifth body, but one that obviously had died decades previously. The woman had been bludgeoned about the head, her body stuffed into a sack, and hidden in a sub-cellar under the building.
Tempe is determined to find out who she was, and why she was clearly murdered. And so begins an exploration of some of Washington early 20th century history, involving members of the Foggy Bottom Gang, a real-life collection of bootleggers and racketeers who hung out in the now burnt-out building in the 1930s and 1940s.
Then another house in Foggy Bottom burns down, claiming another victim, and all Tempe’s instincts lead her to the conclusion the fires are not simple coincidences but targeted attacks born of vengeance.
This thriller will keep you up at night – it’s a great read. Or as the American writer Michael Connelly, who knows a thing or two about thrillers, writes in a shout: “…smart, scary, complicated, and engrossing from the first sentence”.
- Fire and Bones is one of the delectable novels in Exclusive Books’s Christmas catalogue.