‘Bones to Ashes’ By Kathy Reichs
Published by Scribner August 28, 2007.
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9437-9

This is the tenth Temperance Brennan novel.  Temperence is a North Carolina-born, Montreal-based forensic anthropologist.  In her childhood, she met and became great friends with an Acadian girl two years her senior.  Then the friend, Evangeline, disappeared, along with her mother and sister.  For the next few years, Tempe sought traces of her friend with no success.
 
Thirty years later, a skeleton is found, one of a young girl unearthed in Acadia.  Immediately, Tempe theorizes it could be Evangeline. Meanwhile, a number of other missing girls flood the crime scene, with Tempe’s partner tracking cold cases, two unidentified corpses and three missing persons.  All teenage girls.

While working the cases, Tempe continues to obsess over the possibility that the skeleton is that of her friend.  She locates Evangeline’s sister in Acadia, who tells Tempe her friend was murdered  thirty years before.  Some clues implicate the sister’s husband, an operator of strip joints among other shady dealings.  Ryan, Tempe and Hippo, another cop, pursue the mysteries of the cold cases, and Tempe keeps up her hopes of identifying Evangeline.

As in previous novels, there is an abundance of forensic anthropological science, details of bone dissections and linguistic analyses, all of which prove useful in the process of solving the mysteries.  The customary fast-paced writing and tight plotting brings the novel to an unanticipated conclusion.
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Theodore Feit
Other titles: Deja Dead, Death du Jour, Deadly Decisions, Fatal Voyage, Grave Secrets, Bare Bones, Monday Mourning, Cross Bones, Break No Bones

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