Author:Kathy Reichs,Linda Emond
Under the microscope, the outer bone surface is a moonscape of craters...
'Preliminary diagnosis?'
'Deformity of the bone. Maybe. Cortical destruction on a metacarpal. Maybe. Localised infection? Systemic disease process? Postmortem destruction, either purposeful or natural? A combination of the above? I don't have a diagnosis...'
The skeleton is that of a young girl, no more than fourteen years old - and forensic anthropologist Dr Temperance Brennan is struggling to keep her emotions in check.
Coroner Yves Bradette is being evasive, insisting the bones are ancient and of no interest. But it doesn't quite add up, and a frustrated Tempe is convinced that Bradette is hiding something...
It's not Tempe's case; she's overwhelmed with more urgent work in the lab... But the nagging in her subconscious won't let up. A memory triggered, deep in her hindbrain - the disappearance of a childhood friend; no warning, no explanation...
Working on instinct, Tempe takes matters into her own hands. But she couldn't have predicted where this case would lead, or the horrors it would eventually uncover...Can Tempe maintain a professional distance as the past catches up with her in this, her most deeply personal case yet?
A unique and disturbing summer read... Pierre Magnan is a complete original
—— Sunday TimesThe author has developed a cunning sleight-of-hand in thrusting a key clue under the reader's nose, yet disguising it. Veteran reader of crime fiction though I am, I didn't guess correctly. But the atmosphere is most to be relished. The lavishly complicated plot unfolds among spine-tingling descriptions of remote Provence
—— Jane Jakeman , IndependentFrom real to surreal...This quirky story of avarice and vengeance in rural France unfolds with all the charm of a slightly puzzling art house french movie
—— Carla McKay , Daily MailCrime fiction for those with a soul and a dark sense of humour
—— Independent on SundayMagnan chronicles the hidden passions seething below the apparently idyllic surface of rural life [in a style] closer to Flaubert than Midsomer Murders
—— Daily TelegraphMagnan is a master storyteller... unmissable
—— Country MagazineThis is a book full of surprising discoveries and reversals, but also a fascinating portrait of a society closer to fracture than anyone is prepared to admit...One of the novel's strength's is that it values intelligence, and the process of analytic thought as much as it does the sensational moments
—— Roz Kaveney , IndependentPearl's is an ambitious project; literary criticism, biography, reconstruction, reportage and fiction, all in one volume...Where else could you find all this and disquisitions on the slave trade, voter fraud in local elections and the workings of the US postal system? And the truth about Edgar Allan Poe's death?
—— Nicola Smyth , Independent on SundayFascinating reading
—— The TimesThis is a story not for people who like reading novels but for the much larger number who like solving puzzles
—— Sunday TelegraphBruen's tightly coiled prose strikes like a piss-soaked rattler.
—— CapitalSharp, punch and unsettling, Priest is a masterpiece.
—— Peterborough Evening Telegraph... An intensely dark maelstrom ... excellent.
—— www.marymartin.com.auBruen should be valued as one of the most challenging and memorable writers in the genre at the moment.
—— www.reviewingtheevidence.com