When forensic anthropologist Lindsay Chamberlain signed on for a dig, she expected a little angst - the site of ancient American Indian remains was scheduled for flooding, she was conflicted about her feelings for two men on the dig, and supervising students always throws up more problems than you anticipate. What she didn't see coming was not only in the discovery of bones that, though over fifty years old, were much more recent than those the group were intending to uncover, but also becoming embroiled in the hunt for a paedophile serial killer.
I found it really difficult to judge A Rumor of Bones (a title that doesn't even make much sense - there are no rumours about bones anywhere in the novel) on its own merits because I so recently read the very well written and involving Carved in Bone that I kept comparing this (unfavourably) to it. The biggest issue I had was the relationships - I never got a clear picture of how Lindsay felt about either Frank or Derrick, or what her relationship with either of them was. Both men have another woman interested in them, and Lindsay's clearly stringing them both along but when one of the women calls her on it she not only expresses complete surprise to her but also seems taken aback herself - "At first she was angry, but by the time she got to the lab, she was wondering if there wasn't some truth in Michelle's accusation. Come on, she said to herself, Frank and Derrick are adults,. They can choose for themselves."
This didn't exactly warm me to her, but I could overlook it if she were otherwise interesting. She is, however, Too Dumb To Live - after a series of attempted sabotage, a serial killer on the loose, and a stalker fixated on Lindsay, she goes meandering along a deserted forest edge at dawn, alone. When she detected "the smell of something out of place, vaguely familiar," and is then chloroformed and abducted I was far from shocked. Although I did wonder where she came across chloroform previously, in order to recognise it, and where the abductor got his hands on it. Picky, perhaps, but the book was written only twelve years ago, and not when chloroform was in wide use.
Then there was the stilted dialogue. I know people don't always use contractions, but in casual conversation this is most often to emphasise an aspect of the usually contracted compound, so that phrases like "Let us ID this box of mammal bones," "Come on, Lindsay, it is almost lunch time!" and "Have you seen it? It is a very neat place," jolted me out of the novel (as much as I was immersed in it, at any rate).
This may sound petty, though I flagged it early in the book, before I was thoroughly over it - I also didn't like Lindsay's dress sense: she "wore the one suit she had packed, an off-white linen pant suit with an emerald green silk blouse." Well, it could have been the other way around, I suppose, but ick. Especially as she was wearing it when going to inform a woman that the bones of her missing five year old daughter had been found, one leg so savagely disarticulated from the pelvis that - even without flesh - it was clear she'd been brutally molested.
Anything else? Well, each chapter opens with a quote that references bones. There wasn't any great connection with the contents of the chapter, or the progress of the novel as a whole, even where this could have been the case - it feels as though someone just searched for bone quotes and slotted them in at random.
The characterisation's clumsy, and the following exchange jumped out at me as a combination of an (unnecessary) data dump and unwarranted supposition:
"What does your father do?"
"He teaches Shakespeare at a community college in Kentucky. My mother trains and breeds Arabian horses."
"Not thoroughbreds?"
"No. They are quite expensive."
"Sounds like you have a nice family."
Well, sounds like you have an educated (though bizarrely narrowly specialised, especially for a community college lecturer) father and a horse breeding mother. There isn't anything there about what kind of people they are...
Okay, enough. I did finish A Rumor of Bones, so it wasn't all bad - the story gripped me in spite of the many (many) issues I had with the style and the protagonist, and even though not only the identity of the mystery body and the killer of it (with a flag so obvious is was practically neon) were so little a surprise that I ended up feeling flat over all, I'm thinking about giving the second Lindsay Chamberlain mystery a go. - Alex
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