Spider Bones by Kathy Reichs

Spider Bones is the thirteenth Temperance Brennan novel.  You don’t need to read the first twelve to enjoy the book but it helps with some of the characters and back history (although Reichs is pretty good at filling in the gaps).  Anyway, the novel starts out in Canada where a body is pulled from a pond.  When they run the prints they get a hit – to a guy who supposedly died in 1968 in Vietnam and is buried in North Carolina.  This leads Dr. Brennan to North Carolina to exhume the body and then to Hawaii to JPAC (the US military’s Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, whose mission is to find and identify missing soldiers).  In Hawaii, Brennan becomes involved in a local case and as usual manages to annoy some criminal types who come after her and her family.  Pretty formulaic but not in a bad way.  Of course, Brennan finds a way to invite her on again-off again boyfriend and partner, Andrew Ryan and his daughter to the island as well.

As I said before, these books are pretty formulaic and when I read the first twelve all at once, it got old, fast.  But reading this one a whole year later I actually really enjoyed it.  I couldn’t put it down.  Reichs, at times gets a little technical and her “easy” explanations aren’t that great either.  For example, in this book she explains a DNA sequencing technique that I actually know about and she managed to confuse me.  But most of the time the technical stuff isn’t important to the story and you can just skim over those parts if you’re not interested (or confused).

Overall, I liked this instalment a lot better than some of the previous ones but as I mentioned earlier that could have something to do with reading them all at once.  If you’ve read any crime fiction, it’s just what’s expected and it’s entertaining and educational to boot.