The Bone Hacker

The Bone Hacker Kathy Reichs

Temperance Brennan, in spite of her name, has a problem with alcohol, so when her latest case leads her to the islands of Turks and Caicos, her punches must be free of rum.  Brennan is a forensic anthropologist, and this is her 22^nd outing under the authorship of Kathy Reichs. 

Bones are what Brennan hacks, delicately, as part of her job, and the word bone/bones features in most of the titles of the series begun by Reichs in 1997.  Since then she has written roughly one book per year and The Bone Hacker is the latest iteration.  For this outing Reichs drags her unwilling protagonist to the British Overseas Territory in the Caribbean. 

A local gang member has died whilst in Brennan’s home territory of Montreal, and a visiting Superintendent Tiersa Musgrove, from Providenciales, persuades the anthropologist to fly back with her to study some male skeletons dating from seven years back to the present day.

Every year or so some bones have been found and easily identified as those of young men with ‘film star looks’ but no criminal records.  In each case the dead tourist has lost his left hand.  It seems that Brennan is not the only bone hacker on the island, there is also a serial wrist severer on the loose. 

Many of the locations in The Bone Hacker have names suggesting paradise, but Brennan misses her home in Montreal and life partners, Ryan, an ex-cop and Birdie, a cat.  In addition, she has no peace in her laboratory but, instead, is taken out in the field by Musgrove and, later, her subordinate, nicknamed Monk. 

Delroy Monck is Irish Jamaican, and is a colourful character, not only in the way he dresses.  His sartorial choices include orange or ecru pants and a coral shirt, but his unique appearance mainly stems from a ‘Star Wars’ prosthetic left arm.  This tool, of course, does not leave fingerprints; when he is searching a crime scene only one glove is required.

Dissatisfied by the number of corpses Reichs introduces a boat of bodies drifting on the blue ocean.  There are four men and a boy, emaciated and seemingly undamaged by anything other than thirst. Why did they not call for help, using their radios and other technology?  Why just sit aimlessly on the deck waiting to die? 

But she’s not finished yet.  Reichs has powder up her sleeve and delivers further shock deaths: one of the key suspects and one of the main characters are sacrificed to intensify the plot.  Officers from the FBI arrive too.  Is the population of the island sufficient to support both killers and deceased?  Even Brennan’s life is threatened on more than one occasion as she attempts to help the local law enforcers find the murderer/s.

As a result of Brennan’s slicing and microscopic inspection of bones some useful clues emerge but also important are her acute observational skills alongside her encyclopaedic knowledge of sharp weapons.  As a forensic anthropologist herself Reichs is able to provide accurate detail. 

There is another threat however, this one global rather than parochial, something as serious as the 9/11 attacks.  Can the forces for good find the evil perpetrators in time to prevent a catastrophe?  Reichs has written a page turner which stays just within the realms of credibility.

works cited

Reichs, K. Bone Hacker. Simon & Schuster. 2023.

A version of this review was first published on page 36 of the Weekend section of the Irish Examiner on 19th August 2023. It is reproduced here by permission of the Editor.

Run Time

Run Time Catherine Ryan Howard

The punning title of Run Time refers, of course, to the length of a film but also to an all-pervading atmosphere of adrenaline that tells the protagonist it is time to run.  Catherine Ryan Howard structures the novel like a Chinese box.  Each story opens out to reveal a parallel one inside.  Strung through the narratives is a lead character who is a clone of those in the other versions.  For all these heroines, for they are all young women, it is definitely time to run. 

Time is running out and death is near.  It is similar to Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life in which Ursula dies over and over again. Does each death render the reader insensate to the following one?  Or is it, like in a horror film, a way of building tension for the next shock? Or maybe like a bad dream in which you are ready to run, but you are, somehow, paralysed.  It may, indeed, be Run Time, but how to run and where to?

The Chinese boxes contain a metafictional novel, First Draft, inside Run Time itself, as well as an accompanying film script, Final Draft.  The plot is said to be based on true life.  So that adds up to a very confusing three or four iterations of the tale.  Now, as Ryan Howard opens her pages, the film is also starting its production.  Will events in front of camera match, in many particulars, the previously mentioned accounts?  But, hold on, perhaps this is a chicken and egg fable? Which came first? Can any of the heroines realise that what she is reading, and/or living, and is her fate: can she prevent it or is it predestined?

To add to our sense of unease the stories are set locally, in West Cork.  The scene is close to Bantry, and the taxi driver hails from Sheep’s Head Peninsula. The star of the film is expecting to shoot in a West Cork of “rolling green fields and, at their edges, rocky outcrops slicing into a steel-blue sea.  What she finds, on arrival, is a background of “claustrophobic forest”.  It’s more like The Shining, with dark forestry plantations surrounding the set, the trees so close together that they are like an impenetrable bottle green curtain. 

There is a cottage in the middle of the woods.  In Run Time it is a red brick bungalow with smoke twirling from a chimney, in the film script, Final Draft, based on the novel, First Draft, it is a quaint, stone holiday home, whilst on the shooting lot it is more of a log cabin.  These minor changes tend to hint at a separation of Ryan Howard’s yarns, but this would be deceptive: they are all headed in the same terrifying direction.

Ryan Howard has fun with the tropes of the psychological horror.  The film production company is called Cross Cut, another pun, relating not only to the editing process but to a means of slicing a throat open.  There is no mobile phone coverage for miles around.  You can get lost and disorientated between the rows of thousands of identical trees.  Everybody on set, other than the protagonist is male and one, at least, is really creepy. Things do not look good for the heroine, however feisty she might be. 

The main conceit of Run Time, the thing that sets it apart from others of its kind, is the plurality of storylines, but that structural decision means that it is hard to get close to the central character or to care very much what happens to her.  But Ryan Howard knows how to write a page-turner, and she has done it again. 

Works cited

Atkinson, K. Life After Life. Penguin. 2013.

Ryan Howard, C. Run Time. Corvus. 2022.

The Shining. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Warner Bros. 1980.

A version of this review was first published on page 37 of the Weekend section of the Irish Examiner on 20th August 2022. It is reproduced here by permission of the Editor.