Death du Jour

Kathy Reichs

Death du Jour is the first book I've read in 2003 that made me want to not put it down until I had turned the final page. It's well over twice as long as most of the novels I've read over the course of this year, and yet it took me less time than many of them to get through. It does have its problems, but readability is certainly not one of them.

Temperance Brennan, a forensic anthropologist who divides her time between North Carolina and Quebec, is in the latter province as the story opens, sifting through the supposed grave of a nun who is being proposed for beatification. Things don't go as planned. Not long after she gets home, she's called to the scene of a devastating house fire to check out a few more bodies. Things don't go as planned. She gets caught up in the twin mysteries of the nun and the house fire, and off we go.

The best thing about the book is its compelling readability. Reichs makes her work unputdownable through throwing clues, monkeywrenches, and events at the reader nonstop from the first chapter till the last. There's never a let-up, no pause for breathing. And this in a novel that tops four hundred pages; it's like making an Arnold Schwarzenegger action flick that runs six hours. Few people are going to try, fewer still will succeed. Reichs manages it well here.

The bad thing about the book, and yes, there is one, is its predictability. There are many points in the book where something happens and it's obvious to the reader how the event connects into the whole puzzle, even while it escapes the police, the main character, and everyone else in the novel. When it comes right down to it, the mystery isn't really much of a mystery; it's more a police procedural than anything else. Or it would be if it weren't trying so hard to be a mystery.

Still, that's not a reason to dismiss a book that hooks a reader this quickly and this decisively. Death du Jour is the perfect way to kill a weekend, a fast-paced, easy read that will make the hours fly by as you wander through the world of Tempe Brennan.