The Bone Hacker

Hacking Restraint

The Bone Hacker
by Kathy Reichs
Simon & Schuster
ISBN 9781398510838

Warning: Some spoilers in here for sure.

So the latest thriller by Kathy Reichs... my once regular Christmas read, now my regular August holiday read... is The Bone Hacker, the latest in a long line of novels featuring her forensic anthropologist and general bone expert Dr. Temperance Brennan. The version of the character to not be confused with the other incarnation of Temperance Brennan on the TV show Bones, who is based as much on Reichs herself as the Tempe in the books, with the two characters seeming to me to be like chalk and cheese.

In this one, everyone’s favourite bone lady finds herself away from her boyfriend Andrew Ryan and investigating some skeletons ‘as a favour’, which possibly connects to a case she is working on, in the Turks & Caicos Islands. But when the lady detective who asks for her help is found murdered halfway through the investigation, she finds herself working with another detective on the case which, at the end of the day, leads to something else again. All I will say in that regard is that I hope this is not the last time we see the character, nicknamed by his colleagues as... The Monk.

This one is another roaring thriller which travels at a rate of knots and was over and done with very quickly. As in, the gaps between the few times I could actually put it down were few and far between. And I think part of that ease of read and heavy pacing is because, like the best of the stories in the classic pulp tradition... of which I count pretty much all contemporary genre fiction... is because the books have become a little formulaic but, this is in no way a bad thing and its just a symptom, I would guess, of Reichs using the techniques that work for her to tell her stories in as quick and exciting a way as possible.

For example, she is still very much using that 1930s pulp magazine style mini-cliff hanger at the end of each chapter to move you speedily into the next to find out... what just happened. Usually it’s a statement of devastation or exclamation at some detail of the case which won’t be revealed to the reader until sometime within the next chapter... such as “His next statement shocked me.” And occasionally it’s a heavy piece of foreshadowing, perhaps the most extreme example would be the chapter that ends... “Musgrove didn’t make that meeting. By Saturday she was dead.” But, you know, it works so... no complaints here.

One thing I didn’t expect was a whole disaster movie style action sequence at the start of the novel, acting much like a pre-credits sequence in a movie, where Tempe, Ryan and a couple of their friends are very much in peril, in a boat caught in a mini hurricane with no life jackets and facing possible death. Yeah, okay, that had my attention and worked pretty well, I would say.

Other notes on this one would be... I was surprised that Tempe didn’t get The Monk’s reference to Rin Tin Tin at one point... Reichs obviously does because she came up with it but it always gives me pause for thought when the character deviates in knowledge from the writer. Another thing that kept me reading is the humour, such as the name of a boat being Cod Bless Us although, it has to be said, there was considerably less eye rolling on Tempe’s part in this book (maybe only three or four times as opposed to gazillions).

Either way though, when a writer uses quality sentences like, “The reprimand sent my molars reaching for each other.” then I’m always going to be hooked by the cleverness and confidence of the writer in charge of the story, for sure. And, I was surprised by the lack of reference to the other stories... I always say start off with the first book in a series and work your way up but, as far as The Bone Hacker goes, if you really wanted to, you could probably jump on board with this one without needing to know the background history of the characters, for sure.

Either way, if you’re an old pro at Temperance Brennan or a newcomer alike, I’ve got nothing but good things to say about this one, with my only caveat being that I recognised a certain cyber attack on one of the main characters around halfway through, a very long time before it was revealed as such at the end of the novel. But she took me by surprise in other areas so, all good as far as I’m concerned. Another great Tempe mystery and I’m already looking forward to next year’s novel. Keep ‘em coming.