By Kathy Reichs
Scribner, 317 pages
Available at Goodwill Bookstore
Famous forensic anthropologist Dr. Temperance Brennan is back. And for her fifth outing, Tempe finds herself far from Canadian or American soil, flexing her expertise in an exotic Guatemalan village — the site of a political massacre during the country’s bloody civil war. Decades after the bloodbath, where many peasants under suspicion as rebels were either killed or simply vanished, the Guatemalan government decides to send in an international team of forensic experts to exhume the mass grave, find out how the victims died, discover who is responsible, and identify the bodies for a proper burial. Tempe joins the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation on a short-term assignment.
In full view of distraught and scarred villagers, the team digs up an old well to extricate decayed corpses of women and children killed by their own government’s soldiers. This work, which is already tasking both physically and emotionally, takes a turn for the worse when two team members are attacked, leaving one of them dead and another in a coma.
As if things weren’t bad enough, Tempe is suddenly tossed into the middle of a modern-day hunt for a killer when her Canadian superiors force her to leave the excavation project and join instead the investigation of a series of local disappearances. It is a case of utmost importance, she is informed, because one of the four young women who have disappeared in the past few months happens to be the Canadian Ambassador’s daughter. A corpse has been found in a septic tank and local authorities, who are convinced a serial killer is on the loose, need Tempe’s expertise.
After initial defiance, she agrees to work with Sergeant-Detective Bartolomé Galiano when she is told the victims are all teenage girls. What the two soon discover is that there is more to the murder investigation when the district attorney pays more than routine attention.
And that’s just the straight plot. Grave Secrets is laden with subplots, ranging from Tempe’s romantic possibilities to the ghosts of Guatemala’s civil war. It makes for a confusing read if you don’t pay attention, but the subplots really serve to thicken the flavor. In addition, author Kathy Reichs makes use of parallelisms, juxtaposing the mass grave with the modern-day murders, exposing the difference with which the cases are handled.
There is no doubt that Grave Secrets has all the qualifications of a first-rate thriller. The characters are persuasive, the plot is thick with tension, and the story follows a juicy, convoluted route that makes it a definite page-turner. What makes it even better is that Reichs, a real-life forensic anthropologist, gives her usual detailed account of the forensic methods involved. Forensics is an exciting science, and although the information given sometimes borders on the academic, especially to those who have never been exposed to forensics, it nevertheless helps spin an exciting enough tale to keep the reader going.
Tempe continues to be a fascinating character with irrepressible humor, sarcastic wit, and yet ultra-feminine appeal and sensitivity. Initially, she does not seem the type you would expect to gamely slosh in septic fluids to investigate decaying corpses, and yet, she is a feisty enough character that it comes as no surprise when she does.
What makes Grave Secrets memorable, however, is not the whodunit factor, but that it takes on the feel of a memoir in the sense of personal grief it betrays. Reich, who drew in from her own experience in Guatemala for this book, manages to remind us the humanity beneath her exact science, and that all that skin and bones once belonged to somebody’s parent, or somebody’s child. – Althea Lauren Ricardo