Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice-for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival.

A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Seasoned readers won’t be put off by the whopping, and highly ironic, coincidence at the heart of Tempe’s investigation.Ĭomfort food for fans who are far past the point of being easily shocked.Īre we not men? We are-well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).Ī zombie apocalypse is one thing. What’s most likely to linger long after Tempe unearths the monstrously timely medical conspiracy that links all the victims is the heroine’s selfless dedication to honoring the dead by connecting them to names and faces and stories.

Recalling a recent inquiry she fielded from Polly Beecroft about the disappearance of her great-aunt from Paris in 1888, Tempe is tormented by a question about the victims she left behind in Quebec: “Why had no one kept searching for them?” As usual in this venerable franchise, the forensics are grimly detailed, the cliffhanger chapter endings nonstop, and the range of incidents competing for attention with the issues the newest remains have thrown into the spotlight dizzying. Andrew Ryan, in Quebec some 15 years ago. But the mystery of their deaths isn’t nearly as troubling to Tempe as the memory they evoke of a remarkably similar case-two anonymous women who were shot to death, wrapped in plastic, and sunk in a box in a river-that she worked with her love interest, detective Lt.

Apart from their gender and age (one a teenager, the other a few years older), the women are essentially unidentifiable.

Passing through North Carolina, the storm tosses ashore a container that’s been the final resting place of two dead bodies. An unsettling discovery brought to light by Hurricane Inara points forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan back toward two murder victims she failed to win justice for in Quebec many years ago.

Kathy reichs code