Book 16 of 2012: Fatal Voyage

Just a quick book review tonight because I'm supposed to be off to Red Cross in about five minutes. The next Kathy Reichs book in the series I'm reading was Fatal Voyage which involves a plane crash and Tempe Brennan's involvement in the investigation. Of course, with Tempe things can never be that simple, an unexplained foot turns up, Tempe is thrown off the investigation and that's just the beginning of the problems.

I vaguely remembered bits of this story but I wasn't entirely sure which elements were from this book and which were from later ones in the series, as I went through this one, I remembered them but normally just as I got to them. It made it feel a lot more like reading a new book, which really added to my enjoyment of it.

When I'm rereading these crime books, I like to have forgotten who the killer is. That way I can read it without wanting to scream at the characters because I know who did it and they're missing all the blantantly obvious clues telling them what I know.

Obviously, I don't know that much about the American procedures for these sorts of disasters/events (come to think of it, I don't exactly know much about the UK procedures either), but I got the impression that Tempe's dismissal was a little bit far-fetched. I'm sure that they wouldn't have allowed her to continue to do what she did, even though there were many people who supported her. But I can't get too hung up on it really. I mean, these are good books which you can just lose yourself in. I imagine that (if things were a little bit stretched) it might have frustrated people who did know about those things, but for me, I'm not really bothered. I can overlook that.

By this book I've found that Kathy Reichs has found a formula that works and sticks with it. Tempe is faced with a case (and a sub-case, which may or may not be related in some way, and if not related then one will influence the other at an important moment). She comes up against some problem, usually in the form of someone who doesn't agree with her/her way of working/her thoughts/etc. She continues to work on the case anyway, finding a huge breakthrough. Someone attacks her/tries to kill her/she is otherwise put out of action (usually around Chapter 30). Then the case is summed up afterwards with Tempe making the decision to make some change, embrace some moment or be a better person in some way.

And I like it. It's predictable, but I don't mind. I like that you can kind of predict what will come, but it's always done in such a way that (when you're reading it for the first time at least) you're not always expecting things to go down in that way.

It's just good that I've not read these ones further on in the series as often as the early ones, because I'm enjoying the surprises that I'm getting from the twists.