Devil Bones by Kathy Reichs

I'm certainly glad that I don't have any rules for the sequence of my reading. This, I think, is the eleventh in the Tempe Brennan series by Kathy Reichs. I had every intention of starting at the beginning, but so it goes. I picked this up off a shelf and started reading, then had to get the ebook to speed up the reading. I'll get back to Deja Dead in good time.

This one is classic Reichs: a long dead body, actually parts of a long dead body, are discovered in a hidden cellar, and suddenly there are bodies everywhere. Also, we have a particularly offensive speciment of the southern (only they no longer seem to be confined to the south) politician/religious bigot. Sadly, his is not one of the corpses, but one may hope from events that he was sufficiently discredited as a man with the ear of God to fail at any re-election attempt.

There is a sub-theme of what Reichs in her endnotes calls "fringe religions" such as Wicca, santeria, voodoo, and a number of others. This is addressed largely in the context of our current national paranoia about "otherness." "'Think as I think,' said a man. ..."

Others have mentioned to me Reichs' justification for the Tempe Brennan character in the TV series Bones. The rationalization is that she sees TV Tempe as a young Tempe, before the series of books begins. I don't like to pick at things like this too much, but --- Tempe in her forties, has a daughter in her mid-twenties. In this book there is a discussion of persuading Katy to graduate from college after six years by cutting off funding (that plot is vaguely familiar, somehow). So, Pete, Tempe's ex, and Katy had to have "happened" before the age at which we find the multi-PhDed "young" and socially inept Tempe in the series.

Personally, I think my second word choice was correct - it is a rationalization which Reichs uses to excuse the quantities of money that she is making from the TV rights. It doesn't really bother me; I even enjoy the series to a certain extent, but every time I read one of the books, I can't help recognizing how much better they are than the series.