fullybooked2017

Kathy Reichs introduced us to Montréal forensic anthropologist Temperance “Tempe” Brennan in Déjà Dead (1997). The latest episode of this long running series begins with Tempe – as ever – investigating a particularly revolting partial corpse – ‘partial’ due to an encounter with a boat propeller – in the Bickerdike Basin. A geography lesson about Montréal and the St Lawrence River can wait for another time, as most of the action takes place elsewhere.

The remains are that of a young man who was a very long way from home – fifteen hundred miles across the ocean in the Turks and Caicos Islands. He didn’t drown. He didn’t die from the swirling blades of a propeller. He had been shot. Straight through the chest.  Perhaps now is the time for a little geography. TCI is a tiny chain of islands in the Atlantic. To the south is Haiti and The Dominican Republic; sail south-east and you hit Cuba; north-west lie The Bahamas and the Florida; sail north east for half a lifetime and you may end up in Bantry Bay.

When Brennan makes contact with the TCI police she speaks to Detective Tiersa Musgrove. Not only is Musgrove interested in the death of her young countryman, she surprises Brennan by insisting on flying straightway to Montréal. The demise of the young man – a gang member called Deniz Been – is not the reason Musgrove is anxious to be face-to-face with Tempe Brennan. Her motivation is to persuade Brennan to fly to TCI and cast her eye over a series of unexplained deaths which have completely baffled the TCI authorities. I’m not entirely sure why Brennan would drop everything and fly off into the unknown, but this is, after all, crime fiction, and pretty much anything can happen.

Brennan arrives in TCI – capital city Providenciales, known as Provo – and finds a luxury holiday paradise, complete with the corpses of a handful of young male tourists – each minus a hand. When Musgrove is found dead in her apartment, Brennan realises that she is neck-deep in a criminal swamp that threatens to drag her under and choke out her life. There are enough conundrums to satisfy the most demanding Sherlock Holmes buffs. Why was a state-of-the-art luxury boat found drifting off-shore? Why has an FBI agent ‘gone rogue’ on the island? Was Musgrove killed by her vengeful ex, or the same person who killed the young men?

After the demise of Detective Musgrove, enigmatic local copper Monck (who has been in the wars –  he has a titanium hand) reluctantly brings Brennan into the investigation. When she eventually gets access to a sufficiently powerful microscope she discovers that the blade which separated the young men from from their hands bears the stamp of discernible writing, and it is in Hebrew. A local shochet (kosher slaughterman) looks a shoo-in for the one-handed corpses, in that he has all the right kit, but why? He does himself no favours when he goes on the run, and it is not until the arrival on the island of two suitably tight-lipped and sharp-suited FBI men, in search of their errant colleague, that it dawns on Brennan and Monck that there is a deeper criminal conspiracy at work here, and one that involves ransom demands and an international conspiracy.

The Bone Hacker has qualities which one finds in so many American thrillers – it is slick, pacy and immensely readable. Tempe Brennan is quick-tongued and even quicker of thought, and the gory medical details bear witness to the author’s distinguished career as an academic and as one of her country’s foremost forensic anthropologists. The book is published by Simon and Schuster, and is available now.