Cold, Cold Bones

Reich’s 21st book in the “Temperance Brennan” series (after The Bone Code) finds forensic anthropologist Tempe back at home in North Carolina. Her daughter, Katy, has retired from the military, and Tempe suspects that she is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. One night, they find a package on Tempe’s front porch with a severed human eyeball etched with GPS coordinates. This leads to another body, and soon, in a grisly avalanche, more victims begin to appear, all killed in different ways. As the body count rises, Tempe soon makes the connection that the murders are copy-cat depictions of past cases that she has worked. Helping her solve the mystery is retired detective Erskine “Skinny” Slidell. Linda Emond, a longtime narrator of other titles in the series, delivers a solid performance, sensitively portraying Reichs’s characters and conveying their full emotional range.