206 Bones

There are 206 bones in the human body. Forensic anthropologists know them intimately, can read in them stories of brief or long lives, and use them to reconstruct every kind of violent end. The twelfth Temperance Brennan novel from Kathy Reichs, 206 Bones opens with Tempe regaining consciousness and discovering that she is in some kind of very small, very dark, very cold enclosed space. She is bound, hands to feet. Is she buried alive? In some kind of cell? Who wants Tempe dead, or at least out of the way, and why? Tempe begins slowly to reconstruct.
Tempe and Lieutenant Ryan had accompanied the recently discovered remains of a missing heiress from Montreal to the Chicago morgue. Suddenly, Tempe was accused of mishandling the autopsy - and the case. Someone made an incriminating phone call. Within hours, the one man with information about the call was dead. Back in Montreal, the corpse of a second elderly woman was found in the woods, and then a third.
Weaving between Tempe's present-tense terror and her memory of the cases of these murdered women, Reichs conveys the incredible devastation that would occur if a forensic colleague sabotaged work in the lab. The chemistry between Tempe and Ryan intensifies as this complex tale unfolds.

Kathy Reichs is a professor in the department of anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.