Rarely has a first-time novelist made such a spectacular international publishing debut as Kathy Reichs did with her acclaimed forensic thriller Déjà Dead. A New York Times bestseller, a number one bestseller in both Canada and Britain, and winner of the prestigious Ellis Award for Best First Novel of 1997, it was also a Main Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, with foreign rights sold to nineteen countries.
Now, in Death du Jour, the author who lives the life she writes about extends her reach while still building on the rich ensemble cast, page-turning suspense, and cutting-edge forensic detail that made Déjà Dead an international sensation.
Assaulted by the bitter cold of a Montreal winter, the American-born Dr. Temperance Brennan, Forensic Anthropologist for the Province of Quebec, digs for a corpse where Sister Élisabeth Nicolet, dead for over a century and now a candidate for sainthood, should be lying in her grave. A strange, small coffin, buried in the recesses of a decaying church, holds the first clue to the cloistered nun's fate.
The puzzle surrounding Sister Élisabeth Nicolet's life and death provides a welcome contrast to discoveries at a burning chalet, where scorched and twisted bodies await Tempe's professional expertise. Who were these people? What brought them to this gruesome fate? And where are the children?
Homicide Detective Andrew Ryan, with whom Tempe has a combustive history, joins her in the arson investigation. From the fire scene they are drawn into the worlds of an enigmatic and controversial sociologist, a mysterious commune, and a primate colony on a Carolina island. Tempe is overwhelmed by the case, confused by her mounting attraction to Ryan, and plagued by worries about her sister Harry's search for spiritual awakening.
Featuring the kind of forensic detail that only Kathy Reichs can provide -- from skeletal reconstruction to insect analysis -- Death du Jour takes the reader on a riveting journey from the morgue to the lab to the crime scene, from the warmth of a barrier island to the frigid cold of a deadly ice storm. With this poignant and powerful work, Kathy Reichs confirms her status as a brilliant new crime-writing star.
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Readers of Kathy Reichs's cool and clever first forensic thriller Déjà Dead will recognize the ironic voice of Tempe (short for Temperance) Brennan, the North Carolina-born scientist who winds up working at the Laboratoire de Médicine Légale in Montreal. Here she bristles at the conservative attitudes of some of her Canadian colleagues.
Despite the cold weather, Tempe's workload quickly becomes heavy: the bones of a long-dead nun now up for sainthood have been moved and tampered with; a deadly house fire turns out to be arson; and a university teaching assistant disappears after joining a cult. Tempe must figure out where (and why) all the bodies are buried in the hard Canadian ground. Her investigations take her home to North Carolina, and to a strange colony living on an offshore island.
Unlike certain other writers who specialize in forensic pathology, Reichs doesn't revel in the horror of death or rub our noses in gore: she uses the science of death to reveal rather than to shock or startle. It definitely makes for easier reading--especially at mealtimes. --Dick Adler
In the bitter cold of a Montreal winter, Tempe Brennan is digging for a corpse buried more than a century ago. Although Tempe thrives on such enigmas from the past, it's a chain of contemporary deaths and disappearances that has seized her attention -- and she alone is ideally placed to make a chilling connection among the seemingly unrelated events. At the crime scene, at the morgue, and in the lab, Tempe probes a mystery that sweeps from a deadly Quebec fire to startling discoveries in the Carolinas, and culminates in Montreal with a terrifying showdown -- a nerve-shattering test of both her forensic expertise and her skills for survival.
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