Kathy Reichs - Devil Bones

Synopsis:

In a house under renovation, a plumber uncovers a celar 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 skul 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 skul brought to the celar or was the girl murdered there? Why is the boys body remarkably wel 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 caled in to investigate, and a complex and gripping tale unfolds in this, Kathy Reichss eleventh taut, always surprising, scientificaly fascinating mystery.

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

DEVIL BONES

By

Kathy Reichs

Book 11 in the Temperance Brennan series

Copyright 2008 by Temperance Brennan, L.P.

Dedicated to

Police Officer Sean Clark

November 22, 1972April 1, 2007

and

Police Officer Jeff Shelton

September 9, 1971April 1, 2007

And to al who have died protecting the citizens of

Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina

Sergeant Anthony Scott Futrel

July 17, 2002

Police Officer John Thomas Burnette

October 5, 1993

Police Officer Anthony A. Nobles

October 5, 1993

Patrol Officer Eugene A. Griffin

November 22, 1991

Police Officer Milus Terry Lyles

August 6, 1990

Police Officer Robert Louis Smith

January 15, 1987

Patrol Officer Timothy Wayne Whittington

July 16, 1985

Patrol Officer Ernest Coleman

July 1, 1982

Patrol Officer Edmond N. Cannon

November 23, 1981

Officer Ronnie E. McGraw

October 18, 1970

Sergeant Lewis Edward Robinson, Sr.

May 4, 1970

Police Officer Johnny Reed Annas

May 21, 1960

Detective Charlie Herbert Baker

April 12, 1941

Officer Rufus L. Biggers

February 12, 1937

Officer Charles P. Nichols

April 17, 1936

Patrol Officer Benjamin H. Frye

June 9, 1930

Detective Thomas H. Jenkins

October 21, 1929

Officer Wiliam Rogers

August 30, 1929

Detective Harvey Edgar Correl

January 22, 1929

Patrol Officer Robert M. Reid

January 1, 1927

Rural Police Officer John Franklin Fesperman February 16, 1924

Officer John Robert Estridge

March 29, 1913

Rural Police Officer Sampson E. Cole

January 1, 1905

Officer James H. Brown

August 2, 1904

Patrol Officer James Moran

April 4, 1892

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 coleagues argued minutiae with al 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 dul. 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 filing spaces with dots. Four hundred bilion 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 ful quartet. Members of each group were feeling a need to have their say.

George Petrela is a linguist who researches myth as a narrative of individual and colective identity. Occasionaly he says something I understand.

At the moment, Petrela 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 pointilism, and not able to reduce or divide my ennui into any matters of interest, I switched to caligraphy.

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 halucinating. Yet. Not that Id mind. A vivid vision would have provided diversion.

Dont get me wrong. Ive not grown cynical about teaching. I love being a professor. I regret that my interaction with students seems more limited each year.

Why so little classroom time? Back to the subdiscipline thing.

Ever try to see just a doctor? Forget it. Cardiologist. Dermatologist. Endocrinologist. Gastroenterologist. Its a specialized world. My field is no different.

Anthropology: the study of the human organism. Physical anthropology: the study of the biology, variability, and evolution of the human organism. Osteology: the study of the bones of the human organism. Forensic anthropology: the study of the bones of the human organism for legal purposes.

Folow the diverging branches, and there I am. Though my training was in bioarchaeology, and I started my career excavating and analyzing ancient remains, I shifted into forensics years ago. Crossed to the dark side, my grad school buddies stil tease. Drawn by fame and fortune. Yeah, right. Wel, maybe some notoriety, but certainly no fortune.