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A review by ncrabb
Bones by Jan Burke
4.0
This Irene Kelly series is easily among the most immediately appealing I've stumbled across. There's just something that immediately demands your attention.
Irene, a newspaper reporter for a small California paper, is trudging through the Sierra mountains as the book opens. She is there at the request of a convicted serial killer who has bargained with the district attorney that, in exchange for a death sentence commutation, he would provide information on the whereabouts of additional graves of women he had brutalized and murdered. Irene Kelly had to go along, despite the unease of her detective husband, Frank, to report on the story. The killer chose Kelly because she had been long interested in the disappearance of a woman in the community--a disappearance to which she had been alerted by the woman's daughter. The serial killer had admitted to taking the woman's life and had promised to show law enforcement officials the grave in return for the reduced sentence.
But he has a plan of escape once he's in those mountains, and he's going to ensure that Irene is among his cadre of tortured and slowly murdered women. Soon, cops are dead, a forensic pathologist is badly injured, and Irene is literally running for her life in what becomes a hair-raising fast-paced effort to re-capture a killer and prevent more needless loss of lives.
Sadly, I figured out way early how this would all end, but its predictability didn't reduce the overall readability of the book for me. This really is an excellent series, and I look forward to my next encounter with it. Although there are no detailed descriptions of how the women who died were treated prior to the murders, it's appropriate to note that these are not cute cozy suspenseful stories. The f-bomb falls several times here, and there are a couple of scenes that are dark and a bit gruesome.
Irene, a newspaper reporter for a small California paper, is trudging through the Sierra mountains as the book opens. She is there at the request of a convicted serial killer who has bargained with the district attorney that, in exchange for a death sentence commutation, he would provide information on the whereabouts of additional graves of women he had brutalized and murdered. Irene Kelly had to go along, despite the unease of her detective husband, Frank, to report on the story. The killer chose Kelly because she had been long interested in the disappearance of a woman in the community--a disappearance to which she had been alerted by the woman's daughter. The serial killer had admitted to taking the woman's life and had promised to show law enforcement officials the grave in return for the reduced sentence.
But he has a plan of escape once he's in those mountains, and he's going to ensure that Irene is among his cadre of tortured and slowly murdered women. Soon, cops are dead, a forensic pathologist is badly injured, and Irene is literally running for her life in what becomes a hair-raising fast-paced effort to re-capture a killer and prevent more needless loss of lives.
Sadly, I figured out way early how this would all end, but its predictability didn't reduce the overall readability of the book for me. This really is an excellent series, and I look forward to my next encounter with it. Although there are no detailed descriptions of how the women who died were treated prior to the murders, it's appropriate to note that these are not cute cozy suspenseful stories. The f-bomb falls several times here, and there are a couple of scenes that are dark and a bit gruesome.