Déjà Dead

Needs editing

As big fan of the TV series Bones, at least the first few seasons, I hoped to really like this book; but I can't say that I did. Three reasons I can identify:

It needs a good ruthless editing pass. There are small things: the lights of an office tower don't in fact flicker like lightning (absent a looming power failure), "his face did the World Cup of wry" is just silly, the descriptions of poor people, sex workers, and the "gay city" are painfully cliched, and so on. And then there is lots of simple overwriting, where I found myself marking paragraphs and whole ebook pages with "cut this", or "why do I care?". Given that it was a first novel and the author wasn't yet famous, I don't know how these survived the editors.

Second, the book is just bleak. The protagonist seems to have a sort of resigned hatred toward her job, her city, her friends, and herself. Forensic anthropology doesn't enable her to rush in and save someone, it just helps her think extra-bleak thoughts after she fails to. Where TV Brennan is admirably but comically hyper-rational, novel Brennan is a constant emotional mess.

And (third) there's not much forensic anthropology! The main factor that leads to cracking the case is an unlikely random connection to Brennan's personal life (more than one unlikely random connection, come to think of it). We do get one (entirely too detailed, literally down to the mouse-click) description of matching images of bite-marks, but it only eliminates a suspect.

So anyway! I suppose I'm being pretty tough here, likely because I was hoping for something more like a Bones episode, and I got something wordy and bleak instead. Obviously my opinion is not universal, so don't take my sole word. Maybe I'll try one of the sequels and see if my opinion changes! Someday.

If you know Dr. Temperance "Bone" Brennan from the TV show (like I do) you'll find a familiar, yet very different character. She's older, a mother, divorced, and a recovering alcoholic. She's also far more socially well adjusted, relatively speaking. 


The story itself is well written, fast paced, and enjoyable. So why only 3 stars? Honestly it felt a little "by the numbers" and I say that not being much of a fan of mysteries. But between the sacrificial character, the decoy, the antagonistic cop, the daughter showing up at just the wrong time... 


What really killed it for me was the best friend. As soon as she was introduced, I knew she was going to be killed off, especially since there wasn't a whole lot of effort to make her particularly interesting or liked by the reader. Giant red flag. 


Neat book, but I don't know that I'll bother hunting down any of the other Bones books.

This book was not quite as quick of a read as I expected for me, and then when it picked up, my work and family became very time consuming, so I had little reading time.

I am not normally a mainstream thriller reader, but this was very enjoyable and I look forward to Reich's other books on this spiral. I liked the characters, although I found some of the activity by the main character and her friend to be odd. I also hate when random bits of physical description of a character are thrown at you without any complete picture, so you can't really get a good guess at how to put the character in your mind. For instance, based on circumstantial evidence, I gather Tempe to be in her 40s and a very tiny person. Yet her interactions with other people led me to think of a woman in her 20s. It was a bit distracting.

One reason it was a slow read was I found very early on that one of my reading times: lunch was not a good time to read this book, I never knew when gore that did not go well with eating would suddenly turn up. That's a good portion of my reading time. I don't mind gore, but her gore sometimes gave me a queasy stomach, and I could not read it while eating.