Devil Bones by Kathy Reichs

Synopsis:

In a house under renovation, a plumber uncovers a cellar no one knew about, and makes a rather grisly discovery a decapitated chicken, animal bones, and cauldrons containing beads, feathers, and other relics of religious ceremonies. In the center of the shrine, there is the skull of a teenage girl. Meanwhile, on a nearby lakeshore, the headless body of a teenage boy is found by a man walking his dog.

Nothing is clear neither when the deaths occurred, nor where. Was the skull brought to the cellar or was the girl murdered there? Why is the boys body remarkably well preserved? Led by a preacher turned politician, citizen vigilantes blame devil worshippers and Wiccans. They begin a witch hunt, intent on seeking revenge.

Forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan five-five, feisty, and forty-plus is called in to investigate, and a complex and gripping tale unfolds in this, Kathy Reichss eleventh taut, always surprising, scientifically fascinating mystery.

With a popular series on Fox now in its third season and in full syndication Kathy Reichs has established herself as the dominant talent in forensic mystery writing. Devil Bones features Reichss signature blend of forensic descriptions that chill to the bone (Entertainment Weekly) and the surprising plot twists that have made her books phenomenal bestsellers in the United States and around the world.

Dedicated to

Police Officer Sean Clark
November 22, 1972April 1, 2007

and

Police Officer Jeff Shelton
September 9, 1971April 1, 2007

And to all who have died protecting the citizens of
Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina

MY NAME IS TEMPERANCE DEASSEE BRENNAN. IM FIVE-FIVE, feisty, and forty-plus. Multidegreed. Overworked. Underpaid.

Dying.

Slashing lines through that bit of literary inspiration, I penned another opening.

Im a forensic anthropologist. I know death. Now it stalks me. This is my story.

Merciful God. Jack Webb and Dragnet reincarnate.

More slashes.

I glanced at the clock. Two thirty-five.

Abandoning the incipient autobiography, I began to doodle. Circles inside circles. The clock face. The conference room. The UNCC campus. Charlotte. North Carolina. North America. Earth. The Milky Way.

Around me, my colleagues argued minutiae with all the passion of religious zealots. The current debate concerned wording within a subsection of the departmental self-study. The room was stifling, the topic poke-me-in-the-eye dull. Wed been in session for over two hours, and time was not flying.

I added spiral arms to the outermost of my concentric circles. Began filling spaces with dots. Four hundred billion stars in the galaxy. I wished I could put my chair into hyperdrive to any one of them.

Anthropology is a broad discipline, comprised of linked subspecialties. Physical. Cultural. Archaeological. Linguistic. Our department has the full quartet. Members of each group were feeling a need to have their say.

George Petrella is a linguist who researches myth as a narrative of individual and collective identity. Occasionally he says something I understand.

At the moment, Petrella was objecting to the wording reducible to four distinct fields. He was proposing substitution of the phrase divisible into.

Cheresa Bickham, a Southwestern archaeologist, and Jennifer Roberts, a specialist in cross-cultural belief systems, were holding firm for reducible to.

Tiring of my galactic pointillism, and not able to reduce or divide my ennui into any matters of interest, I switched to calligraphy.

Temperance. The trait of avoiding excess.

Double order, please. Side of restraint. Hold the ego.

Time check.

Two fifty-eight.

The verbiage flowed on.

At 3:10 a vote was taken. Divisible into carried the day.

Evander Doe, department chair for over a decade, was presiding. Though roughly my age, Doe looks like someone out of a Grant Wood painting. Bald. Owlish wire-rims. Pachyderm ears.

Most who know Doe consider him dour. Not me. Ive seen the man smile at least two or three times.

Having put divisible into behind him, Doe proceeded to the next burning issue. I halted my swirly lettering to listen.

Should the departments mission statement stress historical ties to the humanities and critical theory, or should it emphasize the emerging role of the natural sciences and empirical observation?

My aborted autobiography had been smack on. I would die of boredom before this meeting adjourned.

Sudden mental image. The infamous sensory deprivation experiments of the 1950s. I pictured volunteers wearing opaque goggles and padded hand muffs, lying on cots in white-noise chambers.

I listed their symptoms and compared them to my present state.

Anxiety. Depression. Antisocial behavior. Hallucination.

I crossed out the fourth item. Though stressed and irritable, I wasnt hallucinating. Yet. Not that Id mind. A vivid vision would have provided diversion.