The Bone Hacker

THE MISPER by Kate London

The title is, of course, police-speak for missing person, and this gritty novel shines an unforgiving light on the scourge of the County LInes drug trade in Britain. Put simply, the couriers are teenagers of school age up and down the land who deliver baggies of drugs to their customers. They are controlled by big city criminals who use the youngsters and their bikes, who know every little lane and ginnel of their home area to stay one step ahead of the police. Central to the story is the death of a policeman – shot by one of these youngsters – and the efforts of some of his colleagues to avenge his death. Watch my main page for a full review soon.
CORVUS – HARDBACK & KINDLE available now.

MURDER AT HOLLY HOUSE by Denzil Meyrick

This a very advanced look at a novel which will be available nearer Christmas time, although given the miserable summer we have been having, it might be more topical now. It’s December 1952, and a dead stranger has been found lodged up the chimney of Holly House in the remote town of Elderby. Is he a simple thief, or a would-be killer? Either way, he wasn’t on anyone’s Christmas wish list. Inspector Frank Grasby is ordered to investigate. The victim of some unfortunate misunderstandings, he hopes this case will help clear his name. But as is often the way for Grasby, things most certainly don’t go according to plan. Soon blizzards hit the North York Moors, cutting off the village from help, and the local doctor’s husband is found murdered. Grasby begins to realise that everyone in Elderby is hiding something – and if he can’t uncover the truth soon, the whole country will pay a dreadful price.
TRANSWORLD DIGITAL – ALL FORMATS 9th November.

THE DEVIL STONE by Caro Ramsay

This is the start of a new series from the Scottish author. In the small Highland village of Cronchie, a wealthy family are found brutally murdered in a satanic ritual and their heirloom, ‘the devil stone’, is the only thing stolen. The key suspects are known satanists – case closed? But when the investigating officer disappears after leaving the crime scene, DCI Christine Caplan is pulled in to investigate from Glasgow in a case that could restore her reputation. Caplan knows she is being punished for a minor misdemeanour when she is seconded to the Highlands, but ever the professional, she’s confident she can quickly solve the murders, and return home to her fractious family. But experience soon tells her that this is no open and shut case. She suspects the murder scene was staged, and with the heir to the family estate missing, there is something more at play than a mythical devil stone. As she closes in on the truth, it is suddenly her life, not her reputation that is danger! Will Caplan’s first Highland murder case be her last?
SEVERN HOUSE – HARDBACK available now – PAPERBACK & KINDLE 31st August.

THE BONE HACKER by Kathy Reichs

This is the latest in the long-running Tempe Brennan series, and the redoubtable expert in human anthropology is playing away from her Montreal home turf – in the Caribbean paradise of the Turks and Caicos Islands – although there is a Canadian connection, in the shape of a badly chopped up body pulled out of the St Lawrence River. On the island holiday resort, Tempe has been induced to investigate the deaths of a number of young tourists, each of whom is missing a hand. Check my main page for the full review.
SIMON & SCHUSTER – HARDBACK and KINDLE available now.
PAPERBACK – 24th March 2024.

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.