Buttons, Beau, and Pizza to Go

The seventh in a series of murder mysteries by Kathy Reichs, makes sense even if you read it out of sequence -- as long as you know the basic character line-up. This time her main character, Temperance Brennan, a board-certified forensic anthropologist, digs up evidence under a toilet in a cellar hidden below an old pizzeria. When a plumber discovers a body, he calls the police in (where else?) Montreal, and who is assigned? None other than our beloved Tempe, struggling to balance her case load in South Carolina, her daughter, her crazy love life (including an amiable, estranged, almost ex-husband, and a Quebecois detective boyfriend), and this time, a visiting friend of 20 years.

Tempe is assigned the task of identifying three young girls found in this dark, dank, rat-infested cellar while keeping homicide detective Claudel assured that this case is not ancient history. Although, he has been given three antique buttons, Tempe “just knows” they are not associated with the bodies. But how does she know? These buttons have been verified by a museum expert, and that’s good enough for Claudel to clamp them into a relationship with the bodies that looks more than 100 years old. Tempe has them analyzed as well and finds that one of them is a forgery, which plays into the building’s history as a pawn shop and cover for a fencing operation from the past…but only about 20 years in the past, not the 100 Claudel suspects.

Tempe’s visitor this time is her old friend, Anne, who is having relationship problems with her hubby, Ted. Anne sticks around long enough for Tempe to realize she is truly unhappy about the lack of excitement in her marriage and throughout the book she worries about her friend’s slow descent into a deep depression.

Meanwhile, Ms. Brennan’s love interest, Detective Andrew Ryan is seen months before (in retrospect) to be affiliating with a beautiful young girl, 20 years younger than him (and Tempe). This causes her great unrest, and clouds her thoughts even while investigating her latest mystery about the three dead girls. Of course, he pops up often and acts like nothing is wrong, even after she has been told that he has this woman at his apartment and is seen squiring her around town. She even calls his home where the young girl flippantly cuts her off. This sends Tempe into the normal “well, I don’t need him anyway” mode – for awhile – as least until she sees him again and he flashes her one of his million-dollar smiles.

From close to the beginning of this novel, Tempe keeps missing calls from an old woman who says she knows about the building’s history and has something else to tell her. When Tempe finally tracks the woman down to an address, she is has been dead a few days. Through deductive reasoning and visits with the old woman’s family, Tempe realizes the woman was killed because someone thought she knew too much once the bodies had been discovered.

One day Tempe comes back to her apartment and finds a note from her friend stating that she is “sorry to do things this way” and her friend’s belongings gone. Tempe goes into overdrive, calling every friend and family member of Anne’s that she has a phone number for and turns up nothing. Hoping she will find her, she goes back to sleuthing dental records and bone analyses coupled with results of female Missing Persons reports from the last twenty years. Nothing matches, until she realizes that just because they were reported missing at a certain age and height, it doesn’t mean they died the same year they went missing; then things fall into place and she’s off and running to Claudel, who once again dismisses her conclusions, until their bear fruit at the end of the book. Eventually, she gets a call from Anne who has been staying at a convent trying to sort out her feelings about her marriage’s future.

As Tempe finds out more about the building where the girls were found, she meets a mysterious man who is not really the man he says he is. Turns out, he looks just like the man she thinks committed the murders, and has actually killed his lookalike years before! This doesn’t stop Tempe from searching for the killer, and eventually, she finds him -- just after he has shot himself in the head; or so it appears. Tempe and Ryan rescue two more girls being held in a bondage-related film setting, hidden in a basement on the outskirts of town.

After the girls are somewhat recovered, D (Tawny), claws at Tempe to take her away before something else happens to her. Tempe, believing the girl not fully recovered emotionally or mentally, leaves her in the hospital; only to discover that she and the other girl, Q (Anique), have slipped out of the hospital and disappeared. When Tempe, acting on a hunch, tracks them down with the help of her friend, Anne, both women are knocked unconscious and Tempe finds herself tied up when she revives.

As Tempe’s vision clears, she looks around the old room and realizes she is back at the old house of the killer in his parlor. D is sitting in a chair, incoherent and Q is walking around the house, pouring gasoline on everything in sight – including Tempe. Anne is nowhere to be seen.  Putting two and two together, our heroine realizes that Q has been in on the torture and killings since nearly the beginning of her capture 15 years ago and was actually the one who killed our real killer the day Tempe and Ryan discovered him and the hidden girls that were still alive and outfitted in bondage gear.

The house goes up in flames, Anique disappears, Tempe frees herself after coaxing D out of her trance and takes the girl outside. Looking around, Tempe is sure her friend, Anne, is still somewhere in the house, but it’s freezing outside so she gives her coat to the dazed girl and strips off own gasoline-soaked clothes down to her undies. She heads for the basement, but stops to check a couple of rooms and finds Anne barely alive, but still breathing, and drags her to safety at the last minute.

In the end, Ryan shows up with Claudel and she is taken to the hospital. When she recovers, she finds that Claudel actually does have a sense of humor when he makes a remark about her leopard print undies he saw her wearing after the fire. Anne and her hubby go into heavy marriage counseling and try to give it another go. Ryan explains that the young vixen he’s been escorting everywhere is actually his daughter that he never knew he had until a few months ago, tells her he loves her and asks her to move in, which she gracefully puts off for the time being. Tempe’s original findings are confirmed when, after the fire, a journal is found in the basement containing six names of girls that had been kidnapped, three of which gave positive identities to the dead girls found in the pizzeria cellar.

This book contains all the usual details that Ms. Reichs includes in her novels: Quebecois phrases, descriptive imagery, forensic definitions, and page-turning drama; resulting in another great tale by Ms. Reich.