Book Review: Bones Are Forever by Kathy Reichs

In Bones Are Forever it all begins with the discovery of the corpses of three newborn, at different time periods, babies in an apartment in Montreal, Canada.

Dr. Temperance Brennan is of course at the scene and what she sees really upsets her, something that doesn’t happen quite so often, if at all. Tempe cannot help but wonder what was it that made the mother of these children kill them. Was she really a monster? She had to be. And she’s on the loose.

However, the case is not as simple as it looks. Amy Roberts, or Alma Rogers, or Annaliese Ruben, is not who she seems to be. The cops are certain she is a prostitute and they are close to the truth, but at the same time they couldn’t be any farther from it, as Annaliese has a dark past, and more than one secrets.

What’s the most important thing now though is to find her, and that will not prove such an easy thing to do, since after she paid a visit to a hospital the previous night, she somehow managed to vanish into thin air.

Brennan and her part-time partner and ex-lover Andrew Ryan, are determined to find her, but to do that they first have to find who she really is, where did she come from and if she has a place to return to. Thus in comes Sergeant Oliver “Ollie” Isaac Hasty, a man with whom Brennan had a fling in the past, and who works in Edmonton in Kare, a police division whose sole aim is to protect prostitutes from the predators.

Hasty knows some of Annaliese’s back story, but not all of it, and doesn’t seem to get along with Ryan all that well. Is it because of Brennan, or did the latter provoke him somehow, with his inappropriately sarcastic mood? Or is it the other way around?

Ryan doesn’t seem to be himself these days, but Brennan just doesn’t have the time to sit down and talks things out with him, since they have a scorching hot case to solve. And so begins a journey; a journey that will first lead them to Edmonton, where Annaliese has been spotted, and from there on to Yellowknife, a frozen city in the far north, her hometown.

During it Brennan will meet some colorful characters, create a few enemies, reminiscence about the past and the death of her beloved brother Kevin, think about Katy, her stubborn and independent daughter, learn the history of the region, and come face to face with death time and again.

In the end what started as an investigation for the wrongdoings of a woman, will develop into a journey into the psyches of some greedy people and their dark plans for wealth and power. And Brennan, who’s a fact junky, will at some point come to realize that what things seem are not always what things are.

There’s a lot of pain in this story, and not too many light touches of humor, but it rolls along in a good pace, and even though the plot at some points seems to leak, the reader’s interest remains high from the first page to the last.