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Book Reviews Title Fatal
Voyage Fiction-Net
Rating Buy It
From Amazon.co.uk - BUY
NOW! Cover
Story A plane crashes
in the mountains of North Carolina and forensic
scientist Tempe Brennan undertakes routine
indentification of the victims. With the discovery
of a severed foot well away from the main site,
Brennan fears that, apart from the air tragedy,
another corpse lies hidden somewhere. We
Say Reich's first
novel 'Deja Dead' was sold on the premise 'better
than Patricia Cornwell or your money back." At that
point I'd read all of Cornwell's Scarpetta series
and thought I'd see if she lived up to the
marketing slogan. I didn't ask for my money back.
Not because I thought she was better than Cornwell,
because I saw the potential of Reichs and her
principal character Tempe Brennan. This is Reich's
fourth novel featuring Brennan and I'm sticking
with her to see what happens. There is no doubt
that Reich knows her subject matter. She should -
as it informs on the dust jacket - she is 'one of
only fifty forensic anthropologists certified by
the American Board of Forensic Anthropology." On
occasion, I feel she provides too much detail. The
research she does for her books is extremely
in-depth and this comes over sometimes to the
detriment of the story. There are large passages of
text, which I skipped because frankly science was
never a strength and even when broken down into
layman's terms I was still a little lost. This
section refers to a soil sample being analysed,
"There's little
change in VFAs in a fresh corpse. In the second
stage, a body bloats due to anaerobic fermentation,
primarily in the gut. This causes skin breakage and
the leakage of fermentation by-products rich in
butyric acids. Butyric acids? Volatile fatty
acids include forty-one different organic
compounds, of which butyric acid is one. Butyric,
formic, acetic, propionic, valeric, caproic, and
hetanoic are detectable in soil solution because
they are soluble in water." There are clearly
things we need to know for the story to make sense,
there are other things I would rather not have
found out ever and then there seem to be details
included just so we know how much research Reichs
has done and how much she knows. "When magnified
and viewed under polarized light, osteons resemble
tiny volcanoes, ovoid cones with central craters
and flanks that spread out to flatlands of primary
bone. The number of volcanoes increases with age,
as does the count of abandoned calderas. By
determining the density of these features one
arrives at an age estimate." Perhaps some of
my sensitivity to the amount of detail in Fatal
Voyage came from recent tragic world events, which
Reichs could not have foreseen as coinciding with
the UK release of her book. The novel opens with a
plane crash and Brennan describing what she sees on
arrival at the scene. We are then taken through the
procedures the different agencies undertake to
discover what happened. Obviously my mind strayed
to real life. What is different
about this book is that at last I feel I am getting
to know Temperance Brennan a little better. The
character seems finally to be becoming more rounded
and real, not just the one-dimensional side - the
forensic anthropologist. As Brennan's professional
standing is threatened by a complaint, and she
feels she is being made the scapegoat of the
investigation, we can feel her anger, her pain, her
fears and worries. She is even funny. Reichs
appears to be allowing her character leeway to
develop and in the process she herself is relaxing
and Tempe becomes more human. The story is at
times predicable, and I spotted the 'main
perpetrators' as they were introduced, nevertheless
the writing is strong enough to hold and maintain
interest until the conclusion. The potential
remains marked and I'll be back for number
five. Review by: Susan
Miller |
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