The forensic anthropologist who shuttles between North Carolina and Montréal caught my eye in '97 with Déjà Dead. I waited until 1999 for Death du Jour and was excited in November when I heard Kathy Reichs was releasing yet another one in July 2000.
While I highly recommend the first two as an alternative to Patricia Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta books, I think you might want to wait for this one to appear in paperback. It wasn't that bad, but I confess I was disappointed.
Maybe the subject of motorcycle gangs just didn't do it for me. Perhaps the coincidences were a little too easy. It could be I just don't care for Tempe's nephew, Kit, who becomes captivated by motorcycle thugs. Or maybe Lieutenant Ryan, Tempe's boyfriend, is too much like a guy I used to know.
To be fair, the science is great, the settings are well described, and the characters are colorful. Reichs does her research and it shows. I particularly enjoyed the section on blood spatter; readers who are looking for a cozy bedtime novel will want to pass on this one.
Like her character, Dr. Reichs is a forensic anthropologist and she commutes from North Carolina, where she works in the office of the state's chief medical examiner, to the Laboratoire de Sciences Judiciaires et de Medicine Legale in Quebec. She is one of just 50 forensic anthropologists certified by the American Board of Forensic Anthropology. She is on the Board of Directors of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. And if that's not enough, she's also a professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. When she finds time to write, I'll never know.
Déja Dead won the 1997 Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Novel.
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