Monday Mourning - Starts Out Slow But Hang In There

My wife has a used book business so she has plenty of books on hand at all times.  She also has a pretty extensive collection of audio books.  We recently went on a long vacation and I asked her to pick out some audio books to bring on the trip with us that we would both like.  Since I like the show Bones she thought that I would enjoy Monday Mourning, by Kathy Reichs, since the main character in the book is Dr. Temperance Brennan who is also one of the main characters in the show Bones.  Like on the show Tempe Brenann is a Forensic Anthropologist, which means she figures out what has happened to victims by studying their bones.

The Temperance Brennan in this book is not exactly like the one on the show.  I am assuming the character Bones on the show was loosely based off of the character in this book, and others.  The Tempe in this book is probably older than the woman in the show since she has an adult daughter.  She also in this book has a boyfriend. The Tempe in this book does not work side by side with an American Detective.  In fact in this book she bounces back and forth from the United States to Canada.  In this particular story she is in Canada.

Temp is in Montreal to act as a witness in a court case and while she is there she gets a telephone call from homicide detective Luc Claudel, who wants her to come and look at some bones that were found in the basement of a pizza parlor. It turns out that the bodies belong to 3 young women. 

Upon further investigation it appears that they were not all placed in that basement at the same time.

When Claudel decides that this is an old case he gives it a low priority.  But Temperance wants justice for these victims and goes about doing the detective work herself to try and figure out what happened to these girls.  Her investigation also reveals that the girls were tortured possibly for quite a while before they died.

Meanwhile Temperance’s best friend has come to stay with her for a while as she works through some marital issues, and Temperous fears her own relationship may be in trouble.

The case leads Temperance and her friend to trace the history of the pizza parlor and then to find the murderer.  A mysterious phone call leads Tempe to believe that the torture may still be continuing.  Now Tempe must find the murderer and the victims before they too end up dead.

To be honest the beginning of this book was very boring. I almost gave up on it.  We took it out at one point but because the ride was so long we put it back in again.  There was a lot of the book that was dedicated to describing doctor Brennan and what she does, and it was all kind of long and boring. 

Thankfully though however, the book began to pick up.  When her friend came to visit she added some much needed life to the story, and some of the characters they met along the way were kind of interesting and even a little funny.

By about the middle of the story we were starting to get in to it and the ending had plenty of action and was very interesting to read, and we were pretty hooked throughout the last few chapters.

So while the book didn’t start out all the interesting it is worth reading, you just need to hang in there until you get the interesting parts.  It is worth it I promise.