Amazon Review
Reichs' stunning debut thriller draws on her experience as a forensic anthropologist in North Carolina and Montreal, but it has considerably more going for it than the mere stamp of authenticity. The devil is in the details, and it is the small betraying details--the alignment of cuts in bloody bone--that convince Temperance Brennan that a series of women, murdered in different ways, were killed and dismembered by the same hand and the same saw. Knowing what she knows is one thing, but convincing her police colleagues is quite another.

Reichs skilfully depicts police canteen culture and the way it ensures that someone who is an expert outsider, not one of the lads, is always going to have to go that extra mile to prove herself and her ideas. Brennan is a toughie, though, and not too fussy about demarcation disputes. Reichs has found a way of having her cake and eating it and giving us a detective who combines professional expertise with enthusiastic amateurism. Even more compellingly, the suspense is turned up several notches when Brennan realizes that she is hunted as well as hunter--they find the killer's lair and find her photograph among his trophies... --Roz Kaveney

'A brilliant novel. Unputdownable.' - Minette Walters

'Déjà Dead is terrific and terrifying in its own right, easily rising above Cornwellian similarities... Excellent plotting, appealingly headstrong heroine and superb mastery of tension.' - The Times

Description

The bones of a woman are discovered in the grounds of an abandoned monastery and the case is given to Dr Temperance Brennan, Director of Forensic Anthropology for the province of Quebec. 'Too decomposed for standard autopsy. Request anthropology expertise. My case.'
Researching recent disappearances in the city convinces Brennan that a serial killer is at work, despite the deep cynism of Detective Claudel who heads the investigation. Dr Brennan's forensic expertise and contacts at Quantico finally convince him otherwise, but only after the body count has grown...
Tempe takes matters into her own hands, re-examining remains from the past, unsolved murders. She is driven to unravel shocking acts of violence by reading the bones of the dead. But even before Tempe makes her crucial breakthrough, the killer closes in...

About the author

Kathy Reichs is forensic anthropologist for the office of the Chief Medical Examiner, State of North Carolina, and for the Laboratoire des Sciences Judiciaires et de Médecine Légale for the province of Quebec. She is one of only 50 forensic anthropologists certified by the American Board of Forensic Anthropology and is on the board of directors of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. A professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Dr Reichs is a native of Chicago, where she received her PhD at Northwestern. She now divides her time between Charlotte and Montreal and is a frequent expert witness in criminal trials. Déjà Dead is her first novel. Her second, Déjà du Jour, was published in 1999.