Kathy Reichs: Swamp Bones

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"Pythonous" bones
Many popular authors write short e-book novellas as promos for their next book, and in most cases they are really not worth reading. SWAMP BONES by Kathy Reichs is an exception - a great self-contained novella which covers new "bone" territory for Tempe Brennan and involves her investigating and solving multiple murders in a book that only takes a couple of hours to read.

Forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan is taking a well earned vacation visiting a good friend Lisa Robbin in Florida. Lisa is a dedicated ornithologist who is checking out the stomach contents of introduced Burmese pythons who are eating their way through indigenous animal and bird species in the Everglades. Within minutes of meeting her friend in her laboratory, Tempe makes a chilling discovery that the stomach contents that Lisa is examining clearly contain human foot bones. Tempe's vacation is immediately put on hold.

In a relatively few pages Reichs takes us through murder investigations in the Florida Everglades where the victims have been carved up by a chain saw and left as meals for vultures, pythons and alligators. The action takes place in the darkest depths of the swamp at the same time as many hunters are in the Everglades competing in "The Python Challenge" with prizes for the most killed, longest etc from State Fish and Wildlife.

I give top marks to Kathy Reichs for a very different, chilling and well written novella. Given her current writing form I am looking forward to the next full length Tempe Brennan novel BONES NEVER LIE  to be released on 23 September 2014.