"Deja Dead" by Kathy Reichs

Three Stars

I love the TV show BONES. It’s a great show, mostly because of the supporting characters, which is also why I still have MAJOR issues with what they did to Zack. Fix it writers – FIX. IT.

Since I love the show the obvious next step for me was to read the books on which it is based. I decided to start at the beginning with “Deja Dead”, the first of Kathy Reich’s Temperance Brennan novels. I knew going in that the books were very different than the show and that the main characters shared very little in common other than their name and profession. So I began to read expecting it to be different from the show but still enjoyable. Sadly, I was a bit disappointed.

In this book Brennan comes off as obnoxious and annoying. She keeps interfering with the investigation of the murders she is working on in ways that I am absolutely sure would end in destroying a case for any prosecutor and set a killer free. Then she is so offended and confused as to why this upsets the cops and investigators. She is so mad that they keep telling her to back off and yet I’m sure she wouldn’t be too happy to find them in her lab performing an autopsy or messing with her bones.

Her behavior is also completely opposite of how a logical, science-minded person would behave. A serial killer has singled her out on two occasions and left a severed head in her backyard and her response is to not call the police then follow a prostitute through the wrong side of town, hiding in dark alleys inhabited by rats and drunken hobos, hoping to stumble across her main suspect. It just becomes hard to understand her and buy in to her behavior.

And then there is the implied relationship with Detective Andrew Ryan. The foreshadowing of this relationship is a bit obvious and feels very forced.

Overall, the characters and their motives come across forced and a bit stereotypical. The one great thing about the book was the murder cases they are trying to solve. I did enjoy how every clue seemed to lead nowhere and have nothing to do with anything else until the very end where Reichs brings it all back and ties it together with one obvious yet almost invisible link.

“Deja Dead” is getting three starts but I’m not giving up on this series. Kathy Reichs is still publishing Brennan novels so I assume that they get better. I think most of the things I didn’t like come more from this being the first book than it just being a bad series. The mystery aspect of the books is great, the character development just needs work.

I’ll go back probably not in order, and hopefully I will come to like these characters and this series as much as I do its TV counterpart.