Sharon Bolton's Reviews > A Conspiracy of Bones

Temperance Brennan, forensic anthropologist with the states of North Carolina, US and Montreal, Canada, isn’t in the best place. She has ongoing health problems and has had a major - and public - disagreement with her new boss: a woman for whom Tempe has zero professional respect. Her consultancy work has dried up and when the book opens, she’s pretty much out in the cold. So, when a faceless, handless corpse, mutilated by wild hogs turns up, any investigative work she does is entirely unofficial. She pretty much becomes a private investigator, helped at times by a police officer mate.
From there on, the plot gets a bit complicated. The dead man, who has several identities, might or might not have links to long missing children. Conspiracy theories abound, the dark web features frequently, Tempe might have a stalker, who might be the faceless corpse, and there was a government sponsored sinking of a Russian ship on which thousands of people died. I might have got that wrong. A few days after I finished the book, much of the detail has slipped away. All in all, this was a fairly unmemorable book.
Years ago, I was a massive Kathy Reichs fan. I loved her first novel, Deja Dead, and the following three or four in the series. Her books were stylish, original and thrilling. She was a new and addictive voice in crime fiction, with stunningly inventive plots and fascinating forensic detail. Nineteen novels on, I’m not so sure. The plot of this one felt stretched, over-complex, loose. I got tired of the number of chapter-ending Eureka moments Tempe had, and frustratingly kept from the reader; there are other plot devices, other ways of keeping the reader hooked. The writing style, too, was annoying. Reichs writes in short, staccato sentences, littered with technical jargon, acronyms and slang, often missing verbs entirely. A few carefully placed semi-colons might have made for easier-to-read prose. The ending, frankly, fizzled out; instead of seeing Tempe catch the villain, she (and we) were left to hear about it second hand.
Reichs is hugely successful, with thousands of loyal fans, so I’m sure this book will do well. For me, though, it simply proves what I’ve thought for some time: even the best of crime series can get tired.