Cold Cold Bones

#1 New York Times bestselling author Kathy Reichs returns with her twenty-first taut novel of suspense featuring forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan who, after receiving a box with a human eyeball in it, uncovers a series of ever more grisly killings eerily reenacting the most shocking of her prior cases. Winter has come to North Carolina and, with it, a drop in crime. For a while, temporarily idle forensic anthropologist Tempe Brennan is content to dote on her daughter Katy, finally returned to civilian life from the army. But when mother and daughter meet at Tempe’s place one night for dinner, they find a box on the back porch. Inside: a very fresh human eyeball. GPS coordinates etched into the eyeball lead to a Benedictine Monastery where an equally macabre discovery awaits. Soon after, Tempe examines a mummified corpse in a state park, and her anxiety deepens. There seems to be no pattern to these random killings, except that each mimics in some way a killing that a younger Tempe witnessed, analyzed, or barely escaped. Who or what is targeting her, and why? Helping Tempe discover the answers is Detective Erskine “Skinny” Slidell, retired but still volunteering with the CMPD cold case unit—and still displaying his gallows humor. But as the two infiltrate a bizarre survivalist’s lair, even Skinny’s mood darkens. And then Tempe’s daughter Katy disappears. At its core, Cold, Cold Bones is a novel of revenge and why revisiting the past may be the only way to rescue the present.

In this latest blockbuster novel from bestselling author Kathy Reichs, forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan investigates what looks to be a typical missing person case, only to find herself digging up bones possibly left by a serial killer, a cult, or perhaps something not entirely of this world. For every case that Temperance Brennan has solved, there remain numerous bodies that remain unidentified in her lab. Information on some of these cold cases is available online, where amateur detectives sometimes take a stab at solving cases. When Tempe gets a call from Hazel “Lucky” Strike, a web sleuth who believes she’s successfully connected a body in Tempe’s lab to a missing eighteen-year-old girl, Tempe writes it off as another false alarm. Still reeling from her mother’s diagnosis and the shock of Andrew Ryan’s potentially life-change proposal, Tempe has little patience for chasing false leads. But when the bones in the lab match the missing girl’s medical records, Tempe re-opens the case, returning to the spot where her remains were originally found. What seems at first to be an isolated tragedy takes on a more sinister cast as Tempe uncovers two more sets of bones nearby. Even more troubling is that the area is known as a viewing point for a famous unexplained light phenomenon, and that a local cult nearby has significant interest in the site. Tempe’s suspicions turn to murder by ritual sacrifice—a theory that gains even more urgency when Hazel herself turns up dead. Struggling to follow the tracks of a killer who will do anything not to be discovered, Tempe races to solve the murders and unravel the mysteries surrounding the site before the body count climbs higher. A suspenseful, modern addition to Temperance Brennan’s ongoing story, Speaking in Bones proves that Kathy’s pulse-pounding Bones series shows no signs of slowing down.

In the riveting fourteenth novel in the #1 New York Times bestselling Temperance Brennan series by Kathy Reichs, a dead body is discovered near the North Carolina speedway right before a NASCAR competition is scheduled to begin. Just as 200,000 fans begin pouring into Charlotte, North Carolina for Raceweek, a body is found in a barrel of asphalt in a landfill next to the Lowes Motor Speedway. The following day, a NASCAR crew member visits Temperance Brennan at the MCME and tells her that his sister, Cyndi Gamble, an aspiring NASCAR driver, and her boyfriend, Cale Lovett, mysteriously disappeared twelve years earlier. Could the body be Cyndi’s? Or Cale’s? As Tempe delves into the old case, secrets begin to surface. Brennan learns that, because of Lovett’s association with right wing extremists, the FBI had joined the investigation at the time of the pair’s disappearance, only to then terminate the search a short while later. Was it a cover-up? Or a simple open-and-shut case? As Tempe considers multiple theories, another man, Ted Raines, goes missing in Charlotte. An employee of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Raines was in town for the big race. So when Tempe’s tests finds a surprising, secret substance mixed in with the remains in the barrel, Tempe wonders just what Raines was up to…or if the body might be his. As she struggles to uncover who is hiding what, Tempe discovers just how far the government is willing to go to keep its secrets safe.

Temperance “Tempe” Brennan faces down the demons of her past in the seventeenth thriller in Kathy Reichs’s phenomenally successful Bones series. Unexpectedly called in to the Charlotte PD’s Cold Case Unit, Dr. Temperance Brennan wonders why she’s been asked to meet with a homicide cop who’s a long way from his own jurisdiction. The shocking answer: Two child murders, separated by thousands of miles, have one thing in common—the killer. Years ago, Anique Pomerleau kidnapped and murdered a string of girls in Canada, then narrowly eluded capture. It was a devastating defeat for her pursuers, Brennan and police detective Andrew Ryan. Now, as if summoned from their nightmares, Pomerleau has resurfaced in the United States, linked to victims in Vermont and North Carolina. When another child is snatched, the reign of terror promises to continue—unless Brennan can rise to the challenge and make good on her second chance to stop a psychopath. But Brennan will have to draw her bitter ex-partner out of exile, keep the local police and feds from one another’s throats, and face more than just her own demons as she stalks the deadliest of predators into the darkest depths of madness. In Bones Never Lie, Kathy Reichs once again satisfies readers looking for psychological suspense that’s more than skin-deep.

#1 New York Times bestselling author Kathy Reichs returns with her twentieth gripping novel featuring forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan, whose examinations, fifteen years apart, of unidentified bodies ignite a terrifying series of events. On the way to hurricane-ravaged Isle of Palms, a barrier island off the South Carolina coast, Tempe receives a call from the Charleston coroner. The storm has tossed ashore a medical waste container. Inside are two decomposed bodies wrapped in plastic sheeting and bound with electrical wire. Tempe recognizes many details as identical to those of an unsolved case she handled in Quebec years earlier. With a growing sense of foreboding, she travels to Montreal to gather evidence. Meanwhile, health authorities in South Carolina become increasingly alarmed as a human flesh-eating contagion spreads. So focused is Tempe on identifying the container victims that, initially, she doesn’t register how their murders and the pestilence may be related. But she does recognize one unsettling fact. Someone is protecting a dark secret—and is willing to do anything to keep it hidden. An absorbing look at the sinister uses to which genetics can be put, and featuring a cascade of ever-more-shocking revelations, The Bone Code is Temperance Brennan’s most astonishing case yet—one that gives new meaning to today’s headlines.

One girl must uncover secrets of the past to save her friend from a terrible curse in this dark and mesmerizing story of love, revenge, and redemption inspired by the myth of Medusa. Milla knows two things to be true: Demons are real, and fear will keep her safe. Milla’s whole world is her family’s farm. She is never allowed to travel to the village and her only friend is her beloved older brother, Niklas. When a bright-eyed girl named Iris comes to stay, Milla hopes her loneliness might finally be coming to an end. But Iris has a secret she’s forbidden to share: The village is cursed by a demon who possesses girls at random, and the townspeople live in terror of who it will come for next. Now, it seems, the demon has come for Iris. When Iris is captured and imprisoned with other possessed girls, Milla leaves home to rescue her and break the curse forever. Her only company on the journey is a terrible new secret of her own: Milla is changing, too, and may soon be a demon herself. Suspenseful and vividly imagined, The Cold Is in Her Bones is a novel about the dark, reverberating power of pain, the yearning to be seen and understood, and the fragile optimism of love.

A complex and riveting tale of deceit and murder unfolds in this repackage of the thirteenth thrilling novel in Reichs’s "cleverly plotted and expertly maintained series" (The New York Times Book Review). John Lowery was declared dead in 1968—the victim of a Huey crash in Vietnam, his body buried long ago in North Carolina. Four decades later, Temperance Brennan is called to the scene of a drowning in Hemmingford, Quebec. The victim appears to have died while in the midst of a bizarre sexual practice. The corpse is later identified as John Lowery. But how could Lowery have died twice, and how did an American soldier end up in Canada? Tempe sets off for the answer, exhuming Lowery’s grave in North Carolina and taking the remains to Hawaii for reanalysis—to the headquarters of JPAC, the U.S. military’s Joint POW/ MIA Accounting Command, which strives to recover Americans who have died in past conflicts. In Hawaii, Tempe is joined by her colleague and ex-lover Detective Andrew Ryan (how "ex" is he?) and by her daughter, who is recovering from her own tragic loss. Soon another set of remains is located, with Lowery’s dog tags tangled among them. Three bodies—all identified as Lowery. And then Tempe is contacted by Hadley Perry, Honolulu’s flamboyant medical examiner, who needs help identifying the remains of an adolescent boy found offshore. Was he the victim of a shark attack? Or something much more sinister?

From bestselling author Kathy Reichs comes a book set in Charleston, South Carolina, the center of a lucrative, clandestine, sophisticated trade in body parts—the kind that leaves the donor dead. Summoned to South Carolina to fill in for a negligent colleague, Tempe is stuck teaching a lackluster archaeology field school in the ruins of a Native American burial ground on the Charleston shore. But when Tempe stumbles upon a fresh skeleton among the ancient bones, her old friend Emma Rousseau, the local coroner, persuades her to stay on and help with the investigation. When Emma reveals a disturbing secret, it becomes more important than ever for Tempe to help her friend close the case. The body count begins to climb. An unidentified man is found hanging from a tree deep in the woods. Another corpse shows up in a barrel. There are mysterious nicks on bones in several bodies, and signs of strangulation. Tempe follows the trail to a free street clinic with a belligerent staff, a suspicious doctor, and a donor who is a charismatic televangelist. Clues abound in the most unlikely places as Tempe uses her unique knowledge and skills to build her case, even as the local sheriff remains dubious and her own life is threatened. Tempe’s love life is also complicated. Ryan, her current flame, has come down to visit her from Montreal, and Pete, her former husband, is investigating the disappearance of a local woman—and he and Tempe are staying in the same borrowed beach house. Ryan and Pete compete for her attentions, and Tempe finds herself more distracted by her feelings for both men than she expected. Break No Bones is a smart, taut thriller featuring the kind of high-stakes crime that makes the headlines every week. Reichs, the inspiration for the hit Fox TV show Bones, is writing at the top of her form, and Tempe has never been more compelling.