Monday Mourning - Hardcover

Reichs, Kathy

4.04

34,639 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0434010383 ISBN 13: 9780434010387

Publisher: William Heinemann Ltd, 2004

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Tempe Brennan has come to Montreal from Charlotte in early December to testify as an expert witness at a trial. As Forensic Anthropologist for the province of Quebec, that's part of her job. She should be going over her notes, but she's freezing her behind off instead, digging in the basement of a pizza parlour. Not fun. Not with all the rats. And the cold. And, now, the skeletonised earthly remains of three people, three young women. When did they die? How did they get there? Homicide detective Luc Claudel, never Tempe's greatest fan, believes the bones are historic. Not his case, not his concern. The pizza parlour owner, the Prince of Pizza as Claudel calls him, found some 19th century buttons with the skeletons, another indicator of the bones' probable age. But Tempe has her doubts. Something doesn't make sense. She'll look at the bones in her lab and do Carbon 14 testing to establish approximate age. And she can analyse the tooth enamel to tell approximately where the women were born. If she's right, Claudel has three recent murders on his hands. Definitely his case. Detective Andrew Ryan, meanwhile, is acting mysterious. What are those private phone calls he takes in the other room, and why does he suddenly disappear just when Tempe is beginning to trust him and to hope he might be part of her life? Looks like more nights at home for Tempe with a good book and Birdie, the cat. As Tempe searches for answers in both her personal and professional lives, she finds herself drawn deeper into a web of evil from which there may be no escape. Women have disappeared, never to return...Tempe may be next.

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Review:

In Monday Mourning Tempe Brennan finds the bones of three dead adolescents in a basement and she has to convince her police colleagues that they are recent enough that the case should be investigated. The book has all the technical know-how, crisply explained, that we expect from Kathy Reichs; readers find themselves peering over Tempe's shoulder as she works out, not only the solution to a puzzle, but how to begin to solve it.

Reichs is a practising forensic archaeologist in real life--but she never forgets that her readers cannot be expected to know everything she does. For a genuine expert though, she is remarkably unpatronising to our ignorance--one of the reasons why Tempe has so many colleagues who know comparatively little is so that her explanations can instruct us while we watch prickly Tempe tread on colleagues' toes. Like all of Reichs' books, Monday Mourning has a pronounced sense of place--Montreal in the snow has rarely seemed so real. If there is a downside to this clever police procedural, it is that we get rather too much of Tempe's fairly conventional emotional life--apparent problems with her lover Ryan end up in quite the corniest of explanations for apparent individuality, while her concern for an apparently suicidal friend adds artificial suspense to a plot that was doing the whole thing quite well in the first place. --Roz Kaveney

Review:

‘It all adds up to a big value meal’ -- Daily Telegraph

‘Reichs always delivers’ -- Independent on Sunday

‘You’ll love the latest story from Kathy Reichs’ -- Bella

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