Grave Secrets: Volume 5 (Temperance Brennan Novel) - Softcover

Reichs, Kathy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0671028383 ISBN 13: 9780671028381

Publisher: Pocket Star, 2003

Synopsis

Investigating a massacre that took place in Guatemala in 1982, forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan discovers that those events are linked to the disappearance of four girls from Guatemala City, as well as the murder of a human rights investigator.

About this title

Review:

Kathy Reichs publishers' comparisons of her with the mega-selling Patricia Cornwell are based on the fact that more and more people (readers, critics, other writers) are calling her better than Cornwell! On the evidence of Reichs' splendid new novel, Grave Secrets the answer is yes--particularly as several recent Cornwell titles have been misfires.

Reichs' speciality is the powerfully realised female protagonist: Dr Temperance Brennan is the best of the many forensic specialists rubbing shoulders in the genre at present: she's professional (never, of course, fazed by her often grisly work), forceful in everything but her messy private life. This time, Tempe travels to the Guatemalan village of Chupan Ya tracking the bodies of 23 women and children dumped in a mass grave. But while digging in the pit of death, Tempe finds the present contains further horrors: four girls have gone missing from Guatemala city--and one of them is the daughter of an ambassador. Soon Tempe is up against both a recalcitrant district attorney and municipal corruption, grimly aware that there are those who want the deaths in both the past and the present to remain a mystery.

What makes this such a distinguished addition to the Reichs library (in a class with such winners as Death du Jour) is the brilliantly realised Guatemalan locales. Not many thriller writers can evoke comparison with such masters of foreign climes as Graham Greene, but Reichs pulls it off with aplomb. The web of deceit that Dr Brennan encounters is satisfyingly tangled, and the unravelling of the mystery has all the quirky energy of Reichs at her most stylish. Perhaps future Brennan outings will have to bring in new personal elements for the heroine to avoid staleness, but Grave Secrets has everything in place for the most diverting of reading experiences. --Barry Forshaw

Review:

"Powerful . . . a page-turner." -- The Hartford Courant (CT)

"The medical details . . . [are] vivid and fascinating." -- Booklist

"Chilling." -- People

About this edition

• Publisher: Pocket Star
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0671028383
• ISBN 13: 9780671028381
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 366