Deja Dead – Kathy Reichs

Pocket Books, Copyright 1997, 532 pages

ISBN: 978-0-671-01136-9

Read: July 2011 (at age 33)

First time read

If you haven’t read it

This book is the first in a series, but it stands alone well.  For what it’s worth, it’s apparently the book that the TV series Bones is based on.  I’ve never seen the show, so I can’t comment on that.

From the back cover:

In the year since Temperance Brennan left behind a shaky marriage in North Carolina, work has often preempted her weekend plans to explore Quebec.  When a female corpse is discovered meticulously dismembered and stashed in trash bags, Temp detects an alarming pattern – and she plunges into a harrowing search for a killer.  But her investigation is about to place those closest to her – her best friend and her own daughter – in mortal danger…

Reactions below the break:

One gripe:

Does the main character really need to think (almost) exclusively in similes?  Could she not occasionally end a descriptive paragraph with something different?

One rave:

It was a good premise, and a gripping story.

Overall

I’m not sure what I was expecting when I picked up this book.  It certainly wasn’t a serial-killer horror novel, but that’s what I got.  The horror bits were well done, and I certainly wanted to keep reading to find out how it worked itself out.  It's too bad the main character and I didn't get along.

Rating:  3 

Characters: 

I found the main character to be irritating – she was whiny and stupid.  She thought that because she was female, everyone was picking on her.  She used the “I’m a mother” card on a doctor to get her to break her patient confidentiality, and it worked.  She wanders alone through the worst parts of town and is surprised when things go bad.  She doesn’t use resources that she has been given. 

Part of it is that the author has some sort of agenda that relies on male violence against women, so she brings it up over and over again.  Men can’t understand women because they’re from the gender with testosterone.  It gets really old.

Another part is the typical horror story stupidity – you know there’s a baddie around.  Why are you going out all alone?

On a more personal note – I think that the author was writing the character’s reactions as she expected her audience to react to events, rather than how an expert forensic anthropologist would react to events.  For instance, the character doesn't seem to be used to being around bodies.  What?  She’s been doing it for 20 years already.  It’s old hat.

I work in an industry where death and dead bodies are not uncommon things to see – there was no mention of the black humour typically infuses such settings, probably because John Q. Public doesn’t think that it should be present.  In my experience, it doesn’t work that way.  I had trouble believing the character when she was shrinking from the smell of a body and things like that.

The side characters weren’t any better.  The best friend of the main character didn’t act like it at all – if the main character didn’t keep reminding us that she was her best friend, I wouldn’t have thought of her that way at all.  The rest were painted with pretty broad strokes.  They were sufficient, but not a strength of the book.

  

Plot: 

The only thing that surprised me about the plot was that there were really no twists.  The places that hardships could have been presented to the main character didn’t.  Most of the things she tried worked.  The characters were all dumb, and that was one of the biggest hurdles to overcome, and it was done by just continuing to beat at the same problems.  There was good tension introduced throughout, however.

Premise: 

An investigator looking into a murder figures out that it’s a serial killer doing the work, and ends up next on the hit list.  It was a good premise, not terribly original, perhaps, but it makes for a good story.

Setting: 

The book was set in Montreal at the height of the separatist movement in the 1990s.  Montreal is a wonderful city to start with, and I thought the author described it really well.  One perk of having the story set in Montreal is that since Montreal is a fairly bilingual city, the convention of starting a sentence in French for flavour, and then finishing it in English for comprehension makes a lot of sense.  People do sort of talk that way – using whichever language is convenient for the people conversing, or whichever is the more accurate word.  I liked that the French wasn’t always translated immediately.  I can still read French a bit, and I enjoyed the opportunity.

Readability: 

I really didn’t like the writing style.  The sentences were short and choppy, which delivers a sense of urgency and would have been good in the tense portions of the book.  But describing, for instance, an interminable meeting in 5 word sentences gives the wrong pace.  It’s supposed to drag a bit through those sections.  My other complaint is that there are far too many unnecessary similes.  For instance “The building is a three-story brownstone, its lower floors bulging into large bay windows, its roof rising to a truncated hexagonal turret.  The roof tower is covered with small oval tiles arranged like the scales on a mermaid’s tail.”  It’s good, evocative description, but wouldn't it be sufficient to say “scales”, rather than bringing a mermaid into the description of a roof?  A few of these similes would be fine, but there were way too many of them.

Other reactions:

Quill and Quire - Doesn't say much, but generally positive.

Caveat Lector - Not really clear, seemed to be a fan.

S. Krishna’s Books - Similar comments, but liked it more than me.

Science Thriller Book Reviews - Again, similar complaints, but weighted them less heavily.