THE REICHS STUFF
Order of Canada member returns to the shelves with The Bone Code
When I created her character, I wanted someone who was smart, self-confident, passionate about her work, passionate about justice both for the dead and for the living who are left behind. Author Kathy Reichs
In 1988, Kathy Reichs suddenly found herself occupying two worlds and two cultures. Her particular field of expertise — forensic anthropology — had brought this respected North Carolina academic to the province of Quebec where she would have a further opportunity to exercise her formidable skills in criminal investigation.
Little did she know that the groundwork was being laid for a unique series of novels featuring a doughty forensic anthropologist named Temperance Brennan. Temperance or (Tempe, as her friends call her), has proved a fictional heroine of enduring popularity, and, like her creator, has a life on both sides of the border.
The concept has been a fruitful one: both Quebec and the Carolinas are still playing significant roles in Reichs’s 20th thriller, The Bone Code, which deals with a frightening link between a pair of gruesome murders that occurred years apart.
“The bottom line, my goal, is always to write a thriller that is clever and throws in twists that the reader doesn’t see coming — particularly in the ending,” Reichs says.
Yet, despite her parade of best-sellers and the fact that her books spawned the long-running TV series, Bones, for which she served as a producer and screenwriter, she’s conscious of a certain irony in her success story.
“I never had that much interest in writing fiction,” Reichs confesses.
Thirty-three years ago, she was professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina and the author of numerous learned academic papers. She also had acquired a formidable reputation in the field of crime investigation. If the police wanted someone capable of teasing the truth out of a few pathetic fragments of human bone, she was the person they would seek out.
This is what led Reichs to Montreal in 1988 as a participant in an exchange program. Unexpectedly, the city would become her second home when she was offered a position at Laboratoire de Sciences Judiciaires et de Medecine Legale.
Reichs’s fictional alter ego, Temperance, also moves between the Carolinas and Canada in the exercise of her investigative gifts. Or as a South Carolina coroner puts it in this new book, Tempe specializes in the analysis of “remains unfit for a pathologist’s scalpel: the decomposed, dismembered, burned, mummified, mutilated and skeletal.”
It was in the early 1990s that Reichs unexpectedly decided to try her hand at fiction.
Her life had taken on a steady rhythm — “and I felt free to try something new. I had just finished working on a case involving a serial killer with some very interesting elements, and I suddenly thought — nobody’s ever heard of forensic anthropology. I thought fiction would be a way to introduce my science to a broader audience. The rest is history, but at the time I didn’t even know if I’d be able to get published.”
That first book, Deja Dead, was published in 1997 and won Canada’s Arthur Ellis Award for the best first crime novel. Furthermore, Reichs felt comfortable enough to set it in what had become her second hometown.
“Montreal was the setting for my first book because I felt it would be a city different enough and exotic enough to appeal to American readers, but also close enough geographically to be comfortable to them.”
Reichs is chatting from a beach house on one of the Carolina islands.
She can look out the window and see her grandchildren heading to the beach carrying their little buckets. But at the moment she’s missing Montreal, a city she hasn’t been able to visit for more than 18 months thanks to the pandemic. Because of the demands of her writing career, she now does little casework, but she still misses the many friends she made north of the border. “I can’t wait to get back,” says Reichs, who was named to the Order of Canada in 2018.
“It is two different worlds — very much so — in terms of cultural difference and language differences,” she says reflectively. But she only experienced real culture shock in one area — the weather. “Every time I stepped out of the terminal and encountered a blast of Arctic air — I could never believe that anywhere could be this cold!”
The new novel, The Bone Code, begins with a Carolina hurricane that tosses ashore a container with two decayed bodies wrapped in plastic and electric wiring. The discovery reminds Tempe of an unsolved 15-year-old Quebec mystery with uncanny similarities. Her search for the truth proceeds in an atmosphere of growing public concern about the emergence of a mysterious flesh-eating pestilence. Could there be a link?
“I was looking for a particular kind of disease that was infectious but not contagious in the way COVID is,” Reichs says. Her researches took her into the often shadowy worlds of vaccine production and genome research. She found herself haunted by the fact that science now has the ability to create designer babies. “That started me thinking. What happens when somebody does this for less than honourable purposes?”
This question supplies a sombre undercurrent to a thriller in which the stakes become alarmingly high. But for all the book’s underlying moral concerns, Reichs still has one prevailing wish. “I hope people have a good time reading it.”
As for Temperance — well, she and Kathy are one and the same, but only to a degree.
“When I created her character, I wanted someone who was smart, self-confident, passionate about her work, passionate about justice both for the dead and for the living who are left behind. Professionally she’s very close and does exactly what I do and cares about her work the way I do. But socially she’s different. She’s single and hesitant to make commitments. The fact that she’s a non-drinker and a recovering alcoholic is strictly Temperance. I certainly take a drink now and then.”
Furthermore, the fictional Temperance hasn’t aged as quickly as her 73-year-old creator.
“It’s an interesting question when you’re doing a continuing character. How do you age her — or do you age her at all? I left it vague at the start — she’s already north of 40 but she certainly hasn’t aged 20 years over the course of the series.”
But Temperance has matured since the first books — “she’s stopped doing all those unwise and impetuous things!”