anna genoese

I am thrilled to be home again. As much as I loved visiting Kat and her family (look at this video of the best baby in the world giving me a high five!), and staying with my dad and stepmother for a while, it's wonderful to be home with my cats and my french press, making the exact coffee I like to drink and settling down to copyedit what looks like an awesome sf novel about spies.

While I was gone, I did not pick up one single book. (And I only wrote 4000/25,000 words on the sequel. Oops!) I did, however, buy too much yarn, and finally finish 206 Bones by Kathy Reichs.

I like the Reichs books much better than I like the show. For one thing, no one in the books ever moralizes about how a "real" family is a mother and a father taking care of children, or how "icky" BDSM is. (Can you tell I'm no longer watching that show? I'm not judging you if you are -- I mean, I'm all about enjoying problematic media while recognizing and critiquing its problems! But I just can't do it anymore.)

I like that Tempe in the books is this flawed person who makes mistakes. She's an alcoholic who, within the last few books, has fallen off the wagon and both started and stopped drinking again. She and her ex-husband have a dance of not letting go that reminds me tremendously not only of relationships I've been in, but relationships my friends have been in. She's dating this police detective who is also totally flawed and does dispicably human things. She has a close relationship with her daughter that's not without its own problems, a very work-like work environment where people are always feeling annoyed or underappreciated or cranky, and often comes home at night to a cold, dark apartment and a Lean Cuisine.

What cinched it for me when I first picked up the books was that she spends half her time in the States and half her time in Quebec -- and her boyfriend speaks Canadian French, which is incredibly hot (and awesome). So there was never any way that I wasn't going to make it through at least the first book -- and once I was through the first book, I was really intrigued by the series, and kept reading.

To a lot of people, this would not be the makings of a really great mystery series. When I describe it to people, I often get wrinkled noses. Who wants to read about a middle-aged alcoholic with a kind of shitty boyfriend who, despite being great at her job, often has problems at work? There's no fantasy element there except the mystery-solving -- but unlike a cozy mystery, she's not a non-professional. She's not trained to solve crimes necessarily, but she is in law enforcement -- these are no Father Dowling books. (Not to knock Father Dowling; I love him. And Sister Stephanie. And do you remember that show? I had a massive crush on Sister Stephanie when I was nine.)

I love the books, though. I loved them from the first page. Partially because I'm not looking for fantasy fulfillment in the pages -- I'm looking for a decent mystery novel that doesn't pretend to trick me with silly plot twists. (Like, at the end? It's never a random person we've never met before who's done the crime. They are solveable.)

And this series has the wonderful addition that, like the show (the only thing that's like the show, actually, besides the main character's name!), she's a forensic anthropologist/pathologist. So in every single book, we're given mini-lessons on the way that bones work, and what it is that she's looking for when she's dealing with $X problem. This is also a major reason I love Nora Roberts books -- no reason I can't learn about horse training/rescue dog training/carpentry/whatever whilst reading a delightful mystery!

So we have all this. All these positive things. Here is the one issue I always have with these books -- just one, but it's a big one. A huge one.

Kathy Reichs is not a good writer. She can string words together to make a readable sentence, but that's about it. She is not what I would call "compulsively readable" -- which actually has a few positives in my book. It means I can put any of her books down without finishing it, and pick it up again several months later, read a couple of pages, and remember exactly what was going on. It means that people who don't have super high reading levels can read these books with zero problems -- even the bone stuff is written in the language of high school science. Her writing is super accessible -- I would be equally likely to give one of her books to my grandma, my mom, my younger sisters, or a teenage kid looking for a mystery novel with a cool twist. A twist of characters, that is -- there are almost never "cool twists" of plot. Which I like, since I often see plot twists coming a mile away and think less of authors who can't pull them off.

(And, yeah, I am one of those annoying people who figured out what was going on in The Sixth Sense at the beginning.)

There's a negative, though, which is that it is sometimes painful to read her awkward prose. And it lends itself to clumsy structure -- mostly toward the end of the book, where in order to create false tension, she ends every chapter on a strange cliffhanger. Like, for example (this is not a real line from a book), "I turned the page of the forensic report and discovered something I hadn't even thought of!"

And every single chapter ends like that. But the next chapter? Often begins with something unrelated ("As I walked to Ryan's office, I resented the Montreal snow that kept me trapped, and wondered if my cat had successfully chewed through all of the sofa cushions yet" -- also not a real line, but close enough to one!) to string out this fake tension. Sometimes the reader doesn't find out what was in the forensic report (or whatever) until the very end when Tempe and Ryan (boyfriend) reveal the killer. But, of course, any reader has been solving the crime along with Tempe (and Ryan) and so already has guessed what the forensic report says!

Basically, it's frustrating as hell that she can't just tell the story and trust in her (extremely strong, interesting) plotting to keep the reader hooked.

Nevertheless, I totally recommend these books, since they are mostly great, mostly interesting, and there's almost never any stupid, bullshit moralizing -- plus, since they're not quite amazing, they're perfect to read on an airplane and leave in the pocket for the next passenger or one of the flight attendants. I myself left my copy of 206 Bones at a rest area on I-87.