Reviews with content warning for Body horror - Déjà Dead

This was a really interesting book. I’ve been meaning to read it for a very long time. I know it was the basis of the TV show bones. I really enjoyed that show. This was an interesting mystery that kept me reading until the end. It actually went by really fast even though it seemed like it was going to be a long book. I didn’t care too much about the characters and what happened to them but I was really intrigued by who the murderer might be. I really enjoyed how the mystery got solved as well.

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rusereviews's review against another edition

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dark informative mysterious sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

(3.5 stars rounded up to 4)

Déjà Dead by Kathy Reichs is her debut crime mystery/thriller and the inspiration for the TV series Bones. I listened to the audiobook, which clocks in at nearly sixteen and a half hours and is narrated by Barbara Rosenblat. We follow our main character with a first-person point-of-view.

Temperance Brennan is a forensic anthropologist, a recovering alcoholic currently working in Montreal after escaping a failing marriage in her home state of North Carolina. A dismembered corpse is found in multiple trash bags, a modus operandi that reminds Tempe of a former case she worked on. Desperate to find the killer after the people closest to her end up in danger, Tempe helps the lead detectives on the case though they wish that she wouldn't. And then her teenage daughter decides she wants to visit.

I was a big fan of the tv series Bones and finally decided to try the series that it was based upon. You never know how closely a show is modeled off a book, and after reading this I've realized the show is only very loosely based off the series. The biggest differences are the setting (the show is based in DC and the book in Montreal), the characters, and of course the story. The only things that are the same in the show versus the book is the name of the main character and her profession.

You can definitely tell the author is a forensic pathologist, as her descriptions of corpses and procedures are very detailed and mostly clinically detached. She leans really heavily on descriptions of things throughout the book and sometimes those descriptions are a little too detailed and dragged on a bit.

There's a good amount of French in here, but I think Reichs did a great job making sure that readers who do not speak the language understand what's going on. That being said, as someone who doesn't speak French, it was hard for me to keep the names of places and characters separate in my mind as they were mostly spoken in French and my brain couldn't parse that as well.

It's also worth mentioning that this book came out in the late 1990s so keep that in mind when you hear things about answering machines and other outdated technology.

I'll definitely be trying out the second book in the series to see if I'd like to continue further.

CW: gore, description of corpses, sexually deviant behavior, violent crimes

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reade's review against another edition

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mysterious reflective tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.5

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