DEJA DEAD By Kathy Reichs

Published : 1998
Pages : 509
Overall Mark : 7/10

Dr Temperance Brennan, the Director of Forensic Anthropology for the province of Quebec, believes that she has a serial killer on her hands. A number of dead female bodies have turned up, mutilated with the hands chopped off and foreign objects inserted into them. Temperance’s belief that the killers are all the same person is refuted by her colleagues and the investigating detectives, particularly Detective Claudel, so she takes it upon herself to investigate the murders with startling results.

This is the first of Kathy Reichs’ Temperance Brennan novels, and a fine first stab at the thriller genre. Although many of the characters don’t seem to possess more than one dimension, Temperance remains a likeable key person in the novel, though sometimes she veers off into sounding like a bit of a desperate case, which doesn’t really suit her character that much.