Bone harvest

Bone Reading (original title Grave Secrets ) is a detective novel by the US-American author Kathy Reichs from the year 2003. In Bone Reading the main character, the forensic anthropologist Dr. Temperance "Tempe" Brennan, as a member of an international team, went to Guatemala to exhume and identify victims of the military dictatorship. At the same time, she is supposed to assist the local police in investigating current murder cases. Four girls, including the daughter of the Canadian ambassador to Guatemala, have disappeared, everything points to a serial killer. In the course of the investigation, however, the ambassador's daughter and her friend reappear, and a murder turns out to be a stalker. There is only one case, a corpse from a hotel digestion tank, that attracts larger circles: it turns out that the victim is an employee of a doctor who works with the local coroner to illegally obtain stem cells from aborted embryos .

Bone Reading is the fifth detective novel by Kathy Reichs, starring Tempe Brennan, who works as a forensic anthropologist in Montreal , Canada and Charlotte , USA, solving murder cases with the police. With this crime novel series, Reichs, together with other authors such as Patricia Cornwell, made the genre of the forensic crime novel known and popular. The weekly newspaper Die Zeit has included bone reading in its edition of science thrillers as a characteristic example of the forensic detective novel.

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Dr. Temperance "Tempe" Brennan, actually a forensic anthropologist in Montreal , Canada , is on the road as a member of an international team in Guatemala. There, in the village of Chupan Ya, she is recovering the corpses of women and children from a well, who were murdered by the military during the Guatemalan civil war and temporarily buried in the well. Tempe is part of a team of forensic scientists tasked with retrieving the bodies, identifying them, and preparing them for a funeral. When the team has packed up the exhumed corpses and wants to transport them away for further investigation, they receive a call from team members, Molly and Carlos, which breaks off. The team found their car parked on the road, Carlos was killed and Molly seriously injured. Molly is taken to the hospital in Guatemala City , where she is slowly recovering.

In Guatemala City, the team wants to examine the recovered bodies. Before Tempe can do that, however, she is interrupted by a journalist, Ollie Nordstern, and then Sergeant Detective Galiano from the local police. Tempe is said to assist the local police in a possible serial murder : Four young women have recently disappeared, including the daughter of the Canadian ambassador , Chantale Specter. A body was found in the digestion tank of a drainage system at the Paraíso Pension in Guatemala City. It is now feared that it is one of the missing women, maybe even Chantale. Tempe is also supposed to help because she has proven herself through a publication as an expert in the recovery of corpses from digester tanks. As she later finds out, she also requested Galiano because he knows Lt. Detective Andrew Ryan of the Quebec Police Department Homicide , with whom Tempe works, well.

Tempe holds the body out of the septic tank, but before she can examine the bones more closely, they are by the coroner Dr. Hector Lucas and District Attorney Antonio Díaz confiscated. Tempe was only given two hours' access to examine the bones. Knowing that this is not enough, she asks a colleague in the laboratory to secretly have computed tomography scans of the skull made. Galiano's team also has the clothes of the dead, in which Tempe finds the bones of a human fetus and cat hair.

Shortly after the first body was found, another body was found on the outskirts of Guatemala City and identified as one of the missing women, Claudia de la Alda. The police quickly find out that she was the victim of a stalker who initially only chased her, but then kidnapped and murdered her. The fate of the ambassador's daughter is also cleared up: Chantale Specter and another missing girl, Lucy Gerardi, are found shoplifting in Montreal.

Chantal's mother, the ambassador's wife, asks Tempe to accompany her to Montreal for a short time to pick Chantale up from the police station. Tempe agrees, because it also gives her the chance to work in her office in Montreal for a few days and ask colleagues for help with a few things: She wants to have the cat hairs found examined more closely and based on the CT images of the Have a plastic copy of the skull made. The reconstruction of the face with the plastic skull shows that the dead person in the digestion tank is Patricia Eduardo, the fourth young woman to disappear.

In Montreal, Tempe unexpectedly meets Ollie Nordstern, the reporter who was about to interview her in Guatemala City. As it turns out, Nordstern is on Chantale Specter's heels too. Nordstern is shot dead on the street in front of Tempe, Andrew Ryan and Chantale Specter. Ryan then decides to accompany Tempe on their return to Guatemala to investigate the murder of Ollie Nordstern.

Based on Nordstern's legacy, they find out that Nordstern was on the trail of a doctor, Maria Zuckerman, who tried to illegally produce stem cells from aborted embryos. Zuckerman worked with the coroner, Hector Lucas, who expected big business from these illegal stem cells, as stem cell research in the US is severely restricted by a ban on stem cell extraction from embryos. Patricia Eduardo, one of the missing women and the second murder victim, was a Zuckerman employee at the local women's clinic. Lucas might want to get rid of her because she found out about her boss's machinations. Jorge Serano, an employee in the illegal stem cell laboratory and son of the owners of the Paraíso guesthouse, was given the task of getting rid of the body. He sank it in the digestion tank, hoping the corpse would quickly disintegrate.

Ryan, Galiano and Tempe Brennan's investigations culminate in a dramatic scene in the coroner's mortuary . Tempe is there looking for Ryan and Galiano with new insights, but does not find them there. Instead, she finds the body of Maria Zuckerman, who murdered the cornered Lucas. Lucas knocks Tempe down and threatens her with his gun. When Tempe tells him that illegal stem cell research has been exposed and that despite the confiscation of the bones, the evidence from the septic tank is enough to identify Patricia Eduardo and link him to the murder, he eventually shoots himself.

Tempe is found by Ryan and Galiano and taken to the hospital. There she learns that Nordstern's murderer was hired by Lucas. Nordstern had tracked down Lucas's illegal stem cell activity and had also discovered that District Attorney Diaz was involved in the Chupan Ya murders. Nordstern was therefore eliminated by Lucas. It also turns out that Molly and Carlos also fell victim to Jorge Serano. Lucas himself was implicated in the murders in Chupan Ya village during military service. To prevent the excavation from revealing this, he had given Serano the task of murdering the most prominent member of the group, Tempe Brennan. Molly and Carlos fell victim to the attack through a mix-up.

At the same time as the murder investigation in Guatemala City is finished, the work of the forensic team on those murdered in the civil war ends. All bodies have been examined and are buried in Chupan Ya village. Molly has now woken up from her coma and will recover from the murder at home in the United States.

The novel ends with the recovered Tempe packing up and leaving her hotel in Guatemala for a vacation with a man close to her. It is left open with whom she will ultimately spend the vacation: with Andrew Ryan, whom she already got closer to in Montreal, or with Galiano, to whom she also felt an erotic attraction. The reader learns in the next novel in the series, Skin and Hair , that it's Ryan.

people

• Temperance 'Tempe' Brennan: forensic anthropologist who works alternately in Charlotte, USA and Montreal, Canada. In Montreal, she is employed as a consultant for the Laboratoire de Médicine Légale to work on cases where only bones can be found
• Mateo, Carlos, Molly, Elena: Members of the international research team who are supposed to exhume victims of the civil war for the Fundación de Antropología Forense de Guatemala (FAFG) in Guatemala
• Ollie Nordstern, reporter for the Chicago Tribune
• Sergeant-Detective Bartolomé Galiano, National Civil Police in Guatemala City
• Antonio Díaz, District Attorney in Guatemala City
• Dr. Hector Lucas, coroner in Guatemala City
• Maria Zuckerman, gynecologist, doctor at the local hospital in Guatemala City and at the Mujeres por Mujeres women's clinic
• Jorge Serano, Maria Zuckerman's employee and son of the owner of the Paraíso guesthouse, where the first body is found
• Chantale Specter, 17-year-old daughter of the Canadian ambassador to Guatemala, disappeared at the beginning of the novel
• Lt. Detective Andrew Ryan of the Quebec Police Department Homicide

shape

The author, Kathy Reichs, was able to process her own experiences as a forensic anthropologist in the novel. So she was actually in Guatemala to support the work of the Fundación de Antropología Forense de Guatemala (FAFG) as a forensic anthropologist . Reichs was also a member of the team that performed the autopsy on Raoul Léger. Léger was a missionary in Guatemala and was killed by government forces on July 25, 1981. His body was exhumed from a mass grave two months later and transferred to Boctouch. To find out the exact circumstances of his death, the two sisters Légers, Cléola and Andréa, traveled to Guatemala in the summer of 2001. This trip was captured in the documentary Raoul Léger, la vérité morcelée . The autopsy was performed in Montreal 20 years after his death on March 16, 2002 . No traces of suspected torture could be found [Quotation Reichs: There were no signs that the fingernails had been pulled out, that he had been burned with cigarettes, hacked with machetes or any other physical indications of torture. ]. However, the team found metal fragments in the tissue and was able to confirm the suspicion that Léger was killed in a bomb attack.

In addition to information on the civil war in Guatemala and the work of the Fundación de Antropología Forense de Guatemala , Reichs also includes details on forensic work in the novel. For example, the recovery of corpses in a septic tank in a toilet facility, an animal hair test and the analysis of mitochondrial DNA are explained in detail for laypeople.

Position in literary history

Classification in the work of the author

Bone Reading ( Grave Secrets ) is the fifth volume in the series about the forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan. In contrast to the four previous novels, this novel does not take place in Montreal and Charlotte, where the main character Tempe Brennan lives and works, but mainly in Guatemala.

Position in literary history

Together with Patricia Cornwell , Kathy Reichs has helped the forensic detective novel become very popular since the 1990s.

The novel Bone Reading was included in the ZEIT crime thriller edition in 2009 as an example of a forensic crime novel . The twelve-volume edition included science thrillers by authors such as Michael Crichton and Martin Suter . Each volume of the edition deals with a different scientific subject, including forensics, neurology, genetics, nuclear physics and oceanology.

reception

Grave Secrets was an international success and was among other things number 1 in the British newspaper Guardian's crime charts and among the top 10 on the Spiegel bestseller list.

The reviews of Grave Secrets have been mixed. The crime review in The Guardian praises Reichs in Grave Secrets for their detailed knowledge of the profession of forensic anthropologist, including the detailed examination of a septic tank or animal hair analysis. The clumsy style of language and the high moral steed that Reichs also takes in the afterword when she alludes to her own work in Guatemala is criticized. The New York Times praises the authenticity of the novel, which is based on the author's own experiences, but also mentions that Reichs is not exactly a born author. Also Publishers Weekly mentioned the knowledgeable representation of forensic work (you provided as a reader, the detailed description of a decaying corpse in a septic tank like). The skillful linking of the various subplots and false leads up to the resolution of the case is particularly praised. The Berliner Morgenpost praises the fast-paced, exciting plot of the novel.

The book has been translated into several languages ​​including German, French, Thai, and Chinese. Audiobook versions have been created both from the English original Grave Secrets and from the German translation beinlese .

Kathy Reichs' forensic crime novels also served as inspiration for the television series Bones . Although the main character in Bones is also called Temperance Brennan, aspects from Kathy Reich's own life were used as models for the television series, not so much the characters and the storylines of the novels.

literature

Text output

• Kathy Reichs: Grave Secrets . Scribner, New York 2002, ISBN 0684859734 . (English first edition)
• Kathy Reichs: Bone Harvest . Translated from American English by Klaus Berr. Blessing, Munich 2003, ISBN 3896671987 . (German translation)
• Kathy Reichs: Bone harvesting: the forensic crime thriller; with a crime thriller analysis by the Zeit-Wissen editorial team . Translated from American English by Klaus Berr. Comments from Susanne Schäfer. Zeitverlag Bucerius, Hamburg 2009. (ZEIT special edition)

Audio books

• Kathy Reichs: Grave Secrets , read by Katherine Horowitz. Random House Audio, New York 2004.
• Kathy Reichs: Bone Harvest . Translated from American English by Klaus Berr, read by Hansi Jochmann. Random House Audio Munich 2007. (abridged edition)
• Kathy Reichs: Bone Harvest . Translated from American English by Klaus Berr, read by Katharina Spiering. Random House Audio, New York 2012. (Unabridged)

Secondary literature

• Ute Eberle: bestseller from the digestion tank . In: DIE ZEIT , February 27, 2002, No. 10, last accessed on March 6, 2020.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Dorothee Birke, Stella Butter, Marion Gymnich: Speaking body: Kathy Reichs . In: Vera Nünning (ed.): The American and British crime novel. Genres - developments - model interpretations . Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, Trier 2008, ISBN 978-3-86821-071-2 , p. 135.
2. ↑ Maclean’s , March 18, 2002 edition.
3. ↑ DIE ZEIT brings "Wissenschaft-Krimis" in cooperation with Edel Edition . In: BuchMarkt. The ideas magazine for the book trade , August 20, 2008, last accessed on March 6, 2020.
4. ^ Nicholas Clee: The Bookseller . In: The Guardian, July 26, 2003, accessed March 6, 2020.
5. ↑ Can't see the wood for the family trees . In: The Guardian , July 28, 2003, accessed March 6, 2020.
6. ^ Marilyn Stasio: Crime . In: The New York Times , August 4, 2002, accessed March 6, 2020.
7. ↑ Grave Secrets . In: Publishers Weekly , last accessed March 6, 2020.
8. ↑ Sven Kellerhoff: Nice bone end . In: Berliner Morgenpost , January 31, 2002, last accessed on March 6, 2020.
9. ^ Official website of Kathy Reichs , last accessed on August 14, 2019.