In Monday Mourning Tempe Brennan finds the bones of three dead adolescents in a basement and she has to convince her police colleagues that they are recent enough that the case should be investigated. The book has all the technical know-how, crisply explained, that we expect from Kathy Reichs; readers find themselves peering over Tempe's shoulder as she works out, not only the solution to a puzzle, but how to begin to solve it. Reichs is a practising forensic archaeologist in real life--but she never forgets that her readers cannot be expected to know everything she does. For a genuine expert though, she is remarkably unpatronising to our ignorance--one of the reasons why Tempe has so many colleagues who know comparatively little is so that her explanations can instruct us while we watch
… read more...prickly Tempe tread on colleagues' toes. Like all of Reichs' books, Monday Mourning has a pronounced sense of place--Montreal in the snow has rarely seemed so real. If there is a downside to this clever police procedural, it is that we get rather too much of Tempe's fairly conventional emotional life--apparent problems with her lover Ryan end up in quite the corniest of explanations for apparent individuality, while her concern for an apparently suicidal friend adds artificial suspense to a plot that was doing the whole thing quite well in the first place. --Roz KaveneyRead More read less...