“Of course not.” Nguyen flicked a wrist, as though to brush away the thought. I hope you don’t mind me viewing the films here.” “Yes.” Seeing her raised eyebrows, I added, “The request came from an attorney named Lloyd Thorn. “Is that the Deacon case?” Nguyen’s gaze had shifted to my screen. Though not exactly effervescent, she seemed organized, fair, and earnest. Nguyen had taken charge at the Mecklenburg County Medical Examiner’s office only recently, so she and I were still testing the waters with each other. “I was completing an autopsy.” Slight accent, mostly Boston but with an undercurrent of something more exotic. Thick bangs brushed the top of tortoiseshell frames not chosen for fashion. Standing maybe five feet tall, she had gray-streaked black hair drawn into a knot at the nape of her neck. I was poking at it, twisting the idea this way and that, when a voice at my back caused me to jump.įramed in the doorway was a woman not much bigger than the subject of the films I was viewing. Suddenly, I sat forward, the gusts and thickening darkness forgotten. One last glance at the final plate in the series. I’d been analyzing the X-rays for almost two hours, my frustration escalating with the storm.

Within the gray backdrop of flesh, the bones burned white as Arctic snow. The palette on my screen mirrored the turmoil outside. The wind was blowing angrier by the second. That wasn’t the question.īeyond my window, the sky was a chaos of gunmetal, smoke, and green. Someone is protecting a dark secret-and willing to do anything to keep it hidden.Īn absorbing look at the sinister uses to which genetics can be put and featuring a cascade of ever-more-shocking revelations, The Bone Code is “a murder mystery story that races across America at the speed of fright” (James Patterson). But she does recognize one unsettling fact. So focused is Tempe on identifying the container victims that, initially, she doesn’t register how their murders and the pestilence may be related. Meanwhile, health authorities in South Carolina become increasingly alarmed as a human flesh-eating contagion spreads. With a growing sense of foreboding, she travels to Montreal to gather evidence.

Tempe recognizes many of the details as identical to those of an unsolved case she handled in Quebec fifteen years earlier. Inside are two decomposed bodies wrapped in plastic and bound with electrical wire. The storm has tossed ashore a medical waste container. On the way to hurricane-ravaged Isle of Palms, a barrier island off the South Carolina coast, Tempe receives a call from the Charleston coroner. “This is A-game Reichs, with crisp prose, sharp dialogue, and plenty of suspense” ( Booklist).

#1 New York Times bestselling author Kathy Reichs’s twentieth “brilliant” (Louise Penny) thriller featuring forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan, whose examinations of unidentified bodies ignite a terrifying series of events.

Kathy reichs code