Cold Cold Bones is an improvement over last year’s The Bone Code with its disappointing vaccine tampering plotline. I read the Temperance Brennan novels because I have become invested in the character and her relationships with Canadian hunky private detective Andrew Ryan, surly North Carolina detective Skinny Slidell and her daughter, Katy, who in this novel has recently been honourably discharged from the army and may be suffering from PTSD, which is causing issues between her and Tempe. But I am beginning to feel that as Kathy Reichs keeps churning out these novels, she is sacrificing Tempe’s intelligence for the sake of plot. Tempe’s behaviour is becoming more and more frustrating as she continues to defy police orders, and just plain common sense, and puts herself in unnecessary danger while acting like she is an action hero instead of a forensic anthropologist.

Cold Cold Bones opens with an eyeball being left on Tempe’s doorstep. As Tempe, with the help of Skinny Slidell, investigates where the eyeball came from and why it ended up on her doorstep, as well as other cases involving a head found in an outhouse, a mummified body hanging from a tree, and the murder of her friend that is made to look like suicide, she figures out that these recent cases are mimicking cases from Tempe’s past. But somehow Tempe takes forever to figure out who the villain is when it was painfully obvious to me, the armchair detective, who it was is as soon as they were introduced in the novel.

Criticism aside, I will keep reading the Temperance Brennan novels. Why? Because they are fast paced and thrilling, because the dialogue is snappy, because these novels are interesting, even though they contain sometimes gross facts about the human body and decomposition and murder. And because I like Tempe Brennan as a character, but it would be nice if she exercised more rational behaviour and impulse control in future novels.