Interview with Kathy Reichs

From Politics Daily --

'Bones' Inspiration Kathy Reichs Inspires Girls in Science --

by Mary C. Curtis --
Posted: 03/9/10 --

CHARLOTTE, N.C. – We occasionally like to highlight accomplished women on WomanUp, even when their busy and organized schedules leave us feeling dizzy and a bit envious. I caught up with Kathy Reichs – forensic anthropologist, academic, best-selling author and inspiration for a hit television show – before her talk at a Book and Author dinner at Queens University of Charlotte.



Reichs and her family live here, where she is on the faculty at University of North Carolina at Charlotte. But she spends a lot of time traveling – to Montreal, where she is a consultant for the Laboratoire de Sciences Judiciaires et de Médecine Légale for the province of Québec – and on the day after Monday night's event, to California, where the TV show "Bones" is filming the first script she's written.

The show's title character is based on both Reichs and Temperance Brennan, star of her books. On the show, Temperance is a forensic anthropologist who solves crimes during the day and writes novels in her free time – books whose heroine is named Kathy Reichs. Got it?

As a producer, the real Reichs reads every script – for the science, mostly, she told me before her talk. She gets a kick out of all the e-mails and notes she from girls and young women interested in following her in a field that had few female role models when she started. An unscientific survey confirmed many girls count "Bones" among their favorite TV shows because Reichs stand-in Emily Deschanel is brainy, not just because co-star David Boreanaz is cute. Reichs said she deconstructs the sexy plot lines with young fans to point out the science. "Did you know that part was chemistry?" she says to them. "And that was physics?"

Reichs said her TV self is "younger." Reichs is funnier, her banter breezy and sharp -- or as breezy and sharp as you can be while describing sifting through skeletal remains. She explained how the bones of victims told her a serial killer in Canada was either a butcher or an orthopedic surgeon, or "perhaps it was both," she said she joked at a gathering of orthopedic surgeons.

The fictional cases can't compare to what she's handled in real life, though. Reichs testified at the United Nations tribunal on genocide in Rwanda and helped exhume a mass grave in Guatemala. Her hardest assignment, "physically and psychologically," she said, was identifying remains found at Ground Zero after 9/11, "13-hour shifts, digging through rubble. Everybody was fragile and wanted to help."

As though to prove her point that she doesn't believe in writer's block, Reichs is working on a young adult series with her 31-year-old son, a "recovering attorney." Her latest book is "206 Bones," named for the number in the human body; "Spider Bones" is due in August.

And, she said, no one calls her "Bones" -- "more like doc."

This week: Temperance Brennan and V.I. Warshawski are back (Kathy Reichs)

From The Globe and Mail (Toronto) --

This week: Temperance Brennan and V.I. Warshawski are back --

By Margaret Cannon --
Sep. 18, 2009 --

206 BONES
By Kathy Reichs, Simon & Schuster, 308 pages, $32

Kathy Reichs's 12th novel featuring forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan is tight, taut and filled with the kind of solid science her fans love. Reichs has always been a writer who learns from her mistakes. Characters a bit thin? She adds depth. Plots weak? She works them out more thoroughly. Too much scientific hugger-mugger? She tones it down. 206 Bones has suspense to burn and a terrific plot, and all of Reichs's talents are on show.

The story begins with a truly horrifying setting. Tempe Brennan awakes to find herself hogtied in the dark. Not only is it dark, it's dank and cold and she quickly realizes that she's somewhere underground, buried alive.

It begins in Chicago, where Brennan and her ex-lover, Montreal Detective Lieutenant Andrew Ryan, have delivered a set of bones to the Chicago coroner, and where Brennan seems to be accused of some form of dereliction of duty. The dead woman has been identified as Rose Jurmain, a Chicago heiress who went missing three years earlier while on a Quebec holiday. The remains show no reason to think a crime was committed, and Brennan's work is sound, but it appears that someone is out to smear her, and that someone seems to be in the Montreal lab.

That story line lets Reichs jump to three more bodies in Quebec. All are older women killed ruthlessly and with no apparent reason. The work leaves Brennan little time to search for the person who put the Chicago coroner on her trail. It also makes her a bit oblivious to the fact that the Montreal lab staff is uneasy. Something is wrong, and the tension ratchets up.

Reichs keeps moving back and forth between Brennan's horrific present and her muddled past. As she tries to free herself, she's unravelling the mess of the past several months, including her unresolved feelings for Ryan.

206 Bones is Reichs at the top of her game. Unlike many of her crime author contemporaries, she has pared down her prose, not plumped it up, so this is a solidly edited 300-page novel that moves like lightning, which I read in a wonderful, day-long rush.