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.