'I settled back and closed my eyes. Questions swirled in my brain, twisting and eddying like the waters of a swollen creek. Who was the third victim? How had he died? Those answers I hoped to find in the lab. When had the death occurred? How had part of the cadaver ended up in a clandestine grave in St Basile? Those queries I figured the Vipers should field. Most perplexing of all was the question of the absent body parts. Where was the rest of the skeleton?'

It is a beautiful spring day and in the quiet woods of the FBI's headquarters at Quantico, Dr Temperance Brennan is teaching a body recovery course. Then comes an urgent phone call recalling her to Quebec, where she is forensic anthropologist for the state. A gruesome duty awaits her: a biker war is raging and two of the foot soldiers have blown themselves up. The only person qualified to make sense of what remains is Tempe.

Like many in Montreal, Tempe cares little what les motards - the bikers- do to each other. Until the body of a nine-year-old girl is wheeled into the morgue, slain in biker crossfire.

Sickened and angry, Tempe vows to fight this evil. When an exhumation brings to light a further mystery, she works day and night to uncover the secrets the bones guard. But can she do so before other innocents die in the escalating violence? Entering the dark biker underworld, Tempe finds herself pitted against dangerous outlaws and organized crime. Unable to turn to her sparring partner Andrew Ryan for help, she finds herself increasingly vulnerable. Will she too make the wrong decision - a deadly decision?

The first Kathy Reichs novel, Deja Dead, wasn't exactly great, a little self conscious, but her style picked up greatly in the second, Death Du Jour. I found it more interesting that the Patricia Cornwell novels as the author does the job she writes about, and therefore gives a more insightful glimpse into the forensic world. that having been said I'm a little worried about this book, and I really hope that she isn't' about to exploit all the stereotypical biker clichés. That won't be much fun to read.

3rd September 2001
Up to page 51

The story so far is good, two bikers get blown up and in the retaliatory violence a child is killed. Kathy Reichs' writing style is interesting, switching between feeling you are being given a lecture in FBI and related services procedure and pulp fiction. The terminology can be complicated at times, and sometimes the descriptions are a tad too graphic...more appropriate to an autopsy report than bed time reading. The somewhat macabre separation between emotion and detail though is somewhat refreshing. The facts are delivered, how you feel about them is entirely down to you.

I have to say though, that up until this point I was comfortable with the subject matter, that is until the last two or three pages which includes a description of the various biker factions and how it all got to be so bad. Now I know in this matter I'm going to be naive and one sided in my view of bikers in general. My experience of this particular group of society has always been exceptionally good...so it was will a heavy heart I read that the first Angels were WW2 vets who couldn't live peacefully after their return from war. Ummm! There have been various accusations against them so far have ranged from organized crime through white supremacy and others...yeah, all in the space of three pages! Now I'm not stupid, I know that this stuff is out there...and I know that the biker chapters of America have that image, but here in the UK when I was on the fringes of the scene it wasn't my experience.

Let me clarify for a moment. From the first few months of my 'sneaking in to bars drinking' days, my favorite bar was the cities primary biker hang out. Basically you go with what you know, right? And this was one of the first places I was introduced to...and I loved the place, though I had no illusions. It was dirty, though it was one of the only two pubs in the center you could actually curl up beside an open fire in, and there was a back room where folks got high...and every once in a while you'd show up and the place would be closed after a raid or a fight. I basically hung out there for about 6 years in total, and until it changed hands it remained one of the very few city center bars I felt totally comfortable going into alone. Whatever else went on in that place I always felt safe. If anyone ever hassled me there would always be an old biker guy (looking like something out of a ZZ Top video) would step up and ask me if everything was cool...and it never went further than that. I have really happy, fond memories of all those old guys I'd natter and banter to. And these are the guys being stereotyped in this book. I'm not for a moment saying that these guys (and those that came after them) are pussycats, that they are blameless and rose-scented, but there is a helluva lot more to them than drugs, crime and violence. My experience of the biker community was the exact opposite, that they were accepting of everyone, and though there were fights I never saw one of the locals start one. That bar is now under new management...and in an ironic twist of fate, is now the pub all the lawyers drink in...I could at this point make some smart ass remark about wondering which were the real criminals, but that would be crass...and way too easy!

22nd September 2001
Up to page 284

Some of my worst fears have been realised, Tempe wandered into a biker bar and was attacked right off the bat in the last chapter, only her undercover lover saved her...ummm. The story has been good though, and certainly interesting. The only problem I have with Kathy Reich is her fondness for acronyms, there are far too many letters, though I appreciate that it's her world and she didn't make alphabetti spaghetti out of the justice department, but it's still a pain for the lay person. The plot runs like this: Two bikers blow each other up...leading to the discovery of two other dead bikers and the partial remains of a young girl beside a club house. The rest of her body was found some years earlier in the US, and Tempe begins to suspect that bikers are involved, so when two of the old crowd are killed, in apparently biker hits (though Tempe has other ideas) she becomes more convinced. In amongst it all is her nephew Kit (as Dad says, it's all getting far too Patricia Cornwell) who seems to have got involved with the worst of the biker community, not to mention the slimy jorno Lyle Crease, who it looks like ran with the bikers around the time Savanna Osprey (dead girl) was murdered. There are clues...and one in particular has bugged me so far, whether a red herring or not I don't know, but a big deal has been made out of the fact that only Savanna's skull and long bones have been found at the biker clubhouse. Errr, hello...skull and cross bones...we keep being told this is the symbol of the Angels, so how come no one's mentioned it yet? And there's this temp chick, who keeps changing hair colour...and I guess is obviously supposed to be a plant in the justice dept. So in the next few pages I fully expect to find out who dun it, with Lyle a prime suspect, though it's more likely to end up as one of the objectionable cops. Kit will turn out to be whiter than white, as will Ryan, who will come to her, woo her and live happily ever after till next time. So let's see how this thing turns out....the interesting thing will be to find out how the girl got from home to her burial site...no obvious explanation springs to mind.

23rd September 2001
The End

Well, let's get it together here. Jocelyn (the girl I suspected as the informant) dun it...or at least some of it. She was a biker, plant...turncoat, whose insides ended up on the outside of Tempe's clothes after she tried to barter for immunity but was spotted by a biker and was shot down. There was a big old biker funeral that ended in a shootout, Lyle Crease tried to use Kit as a shield and both got shot...and (surprise surprise) both survived. Ryan came to the rescue, awwww, Kit turned out to be all mouth about his biker connections, and Crease wasn't as bad as we all had him pegged to be. So tidy there should be a bow around it. Oh...I nearly forgot, Cherokee, the guy murdered by Jocelyn, killed the Osprey girl and then later he and Crease dug her up and put her skull and...wait for it...crossbones over the bar of their clubhouse...because they thought it would look cool, so that's how the remains got moved. Ta dah!!

So it was an easy, pulpy little read, enjoyable as far as murder mysteries go but I got bored with the constant preaching about how bad bikers are. At times it was just too much, along with the actual twist in the plot being untwisty, and more than a little predictable, it wasn't so great. The end ended too quickly, the shootout at the funeral was written with little skill and was a confused mass of sentences that didn't do too much to describe the situation. Had that not been the case we wouldn't have need the summing up. The last couple of pages bugged me, as they were obviously setting the scene for her next novel, surrounding Ryan's infiltration of the bikers and working with objectionable cop #1. I'll read her next book, but I suspect that she's going to become formulaic and tired rather quickly, with her taking her place on the 'challenge free' list of writers along with Cornwell. I want a little more in a murder mystery, I'd hoped that Kathy Reich could deliver it, I guess I was wrong. I don't mind so much, the book wasn't awful, but it wasn't really good either.