Saturday 8 October 2011

CRIME THRILLER REVIEW: Temperance Brennan 14: Flash and Bones - Kathy Reichs

Release Date: 01/09/11

SYNOPSIS:

In the run up to the biggest NASCAR race week of the year, Dr Temperance Brennan is called to a landfill site backing onto the Charlotte speedway track in North Carolina. Someone has discovered a barrel of hardened asphalt with a human hand poking through the top.

With the country's press trained on Charlotte, it is up to Tempe to try to release and identify the body in the barrel. But there is more than one potential victim: the brother of a girl who went missing with her boyfriend ten years before comes forward, and the trail he sets in motion leads Tempe to one of America's largest fascist organisations.

But before she can discover anything, the FBI confiscate the body and destroy it. What terrible secret could they be hiding? As tension at the speedway mounts, Tempe tries to unravel the conspiracy of lies surrounding the missing couple, the body in the barrel, and the horrific death at the track of yet another victim...


REVIEW:

To be honest this has been a hard review to write as I’m really not sure what to make of it. Yes the crime and the forensics were interesting but for me, I really didn’t give a stuff about all the Nascar information. It’s unnecessary and knowing how it functioned was less important to me than the crime and its solution.

Then with Brennan becoming a little too repetitive I started to wonder if she’s had her day and if Kathy might be better handing the reins over to someone younger who can take a different path and give us something new to jump onto in much the way she did with Virals. Don’t get me wrong, the book was reasonable enough for a crime thriller but against a lot of her other titles it felt a little flat and without the love interest working to improve her emotionally and give the reader a little something else it felt that it was more formulaic than anything else. A great shame to be honest.

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