Paul Weiss's Reviews > Written in Bone

"It's the things you never see coming you have to watch out for."

With WRITTEN IN BONE, a solid sequel to his debut novel THE CHEMISTRY OF DEATH, Author Simon Beckett continues to effectively cash in on his real life anthropological experience working with Bill Bass of Tennessee's world famous Body Farm. Unlike many of his competitors in the crowded medical thriller genre who have concentrated on thrill and suspense at the expense of science and medicine, Beckett writes a solid forensic procedural with plenty of interesting details on such minutiae as the rate of decay of human bodies under a variety of conditions, the nature of pre- and post-mortem wounds and the tiny differences between slashing and stabbing wounds and their effects on soft tissue and bones that is superbly balanced with the bloody bits and the actual action. Nor has he forgotten about suspense, twists, turns, red herrings and surprise endings!

Forensic anthropologist David Hunter has been dispatched to Runa, a God-forsaken barren spit of land in the remote Outer Hebrides in the frigid Atlantic north of Scotland, to investigate a death so bizarre that the first cause coming to everyone's mind is spontaneous human combustion. When a ferocious Arctic storm eliminates all communication with the mainland and clues finally surface that prove the death was in fact murder, the game, as Sherlock Holmes would have said, was definitely afoot! Hunter, cut off from any possible assistance from his police colleagues in Britain and Scotland, is forced to investigate the murder with the only assistance available on the island - Neil Fraser, an unhappy, angry officer who wants nothing more than to stay under the radar until his retirement quietly drinking his way to oblivion and Andrew Brody, an embittered former investigator who retired to the seclusion of Runa after the mysterious unsolved disappearance of his daughter many years earlier.

WRITTEN IN BONE is most definitely NOT a cozy mystery in the style of Agatha Christie. That said, the resemblance to AND THEN THERE WAS NONE is unmistakable as the body count on the foul weather-locked island mounts and the only possible suspects are the remaining inhabitants who are looking over their shoulders with growing fear and suspicion. But no potential reader should get the mistaken impression that I'm suggesting WRITTEN IN BONE is derivative. Absolutely not! The characterization is superb, the relationships are as edgy, angsty and as dark as any thriller available today, the dialogue is natural and credible, the twists and turns are devious and ... oh my goodness ... that ending out of left field will leave every reader with a smile knowing that entry #3 in the David Hunter series is just around the corner.

Highly recommended.

Paul Weiss