A short life of the author
Kathy Reichs (b. 7 July 1948, Chicago) occupies a unique position in crime fiction: she is not a novelist who researches forensic science, but a forensic anthropologist who writes novels. She is a professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and serves as a forensic anthropologist for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in North Carolina and for the Laboratoire de sciences judiciaires et de médecine légale in Montreal — one of only roughly one hundred board-certified forensic anthropologists in North America. Her fiction carries the weight of that expertise, and it shows on every page.
Life and Career
Reichs grew up in Chicago, earned her PhD in physical anthropology from Northwestern University, and spent decades working in both academic forensic anthropology and active casework before publishing her first novel at age forty-nine. Her real cases — identifying victims from mass graves in Guatemala and Rwanda, working at the World Trade Center site after September 11, testifying as an expert witness in murder trials — provided not just material but a methodology: her fiction proceeds from evidence, not from hunches or psychological intuition.
She splits her professional life between Charlotte, North Carolina, and Montreal, Quebec — the two cities where Temperance Brennan also works, giving the series a distinctive dual-city geography that no other crime franchise shares.
The Temperance Brennan Series
Déjà Dead (1997) introduced Temperance Brennan — a forensic anthropologist working in Montreal who discovers that a series of mutilated remains, dismissed as unrelated by the police, belong to victims of a single serial killer. The novel won the Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Novel and established the template for the series: a forensic discovery leads to an investigation, the investigation encounters institutional resistance or personal danger, and Brennan’s scientific expertise — specifically her ability to read bones — provides the crucial evidence.
The series now spans more than twenty novels. Key entries include Death du Jour (1999, which introduces the cult investigation subplot), Bare Bones (2003, which moves the action to North Carolina), Break No Bones (2006, involving an archaeological dig that uncovers modern murder victims), and The Bone Collection (2016, novellas). Brennan’s personal life — her complicated relationship with detective Andrew Ryan, her troubled daughter Katy, her struggles with alcoholism — provides ongoing narrative continuity, but the books are fundamentally driven by forensic procedure.
What distinguishes Reichs from the wave of forensic crime fiction that followed Patricia Cornwell’s Postmortem (1990) is the granularity of her science. Reichs describes the process of examining decomposed remains, identifying trauma patterns on bone, estimating time since death from insect activity, and extracting DNA from degraded samples with the specificity of someone who has actually done these things. The novels function simultaneously as entertainment and as accessible introductions to forensic anthropology — a quality that made them enormously popular in classrooms and contributed to the broader “CSI effect” in popular culture.
Bones (2005–2017)
The television show Bones — created by Hart Hanson, starring Emily Deschanel as Temperance Brennan and David Boreanaz as FBI Agent Seeley Booth — ran for twelve seasons and 246 episodes on Fox. The show was inspired by Reichs’s work and character, and Reichs served as a producer, but the television Brennan diverged significantly from the literary one: the show’s Brennan is a social-skills-deficient genius (closer to a Sherlock Holmes archetype), while the novel’s Brennan is more emotionally complex and professionally grounded.
Reichs served as an executive producer and ensured the show maintained forensic plausibility. The show’s enormous commercial success — averaging ten million viewers per episode at its peak — made Reichs one of the most commercially successful crime writers in the world and introduced forensic anthropology to a mass audience.
Themes and Critical Standing
Reichs’s central contribution to crime fiction is the insistence that bodies have stories, and that those stories can be read with scientific precision. In an era when crime fiction often relies on psychological profiling, digital surveillance, or procedural shortcuts, Reichs returns always to the physical evidence — to bones, to tissue, to the material traces that violence leaves on the human body.
Her work has been compared to Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta novels (for the forensic focus) and to Jeffery Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme series (for the procedural intensity), but Reichs brings an authenticity that neither can match: she has actually performed the examinations she describes.
Key Works
- Déjà Dead (1997)
- Death du Jour (1999)
- Bare Bones (2003)
- Break No Bones (2006)
Collecting Reichs
Déjà Dead first edition (Scribner, 1997) in fine condition with dust jacket brings $20–$75; signed copies bring $50–$125. The first UK edition (Heinemann, 1997) is scarcer in the US and brings comparable prices. Later Brennan novels (Scribner, then Simon & Schuster) are widely available; first editions bring $10–$25. Signed copies are readily obtainable — Reichs tours regularly. The most collected items are Déjà Dead and the first three or four Brennan novels, which established the series before it became formulaic.