I am going to take a leap of judgement and say Kathy Reichs is a liberal, as I am, which makes me very happy.‘Grave Secrets’ is the fifth in the Dr. Temperance Brennan series, and its voice is different from the earlier books. I assume the usual honing from experience, the market and the publishers has taken place, but in any case, the writing has changed. It appears to me that that has meant a dumbing down of language, a simplifying of science terms, as well as a significant lighter tone than the previous books, which had a bleak landscape similar to the serial killer ‘Seven’ movie. Reichs has become more fluent in quipping, while at the same time she has shortened the structure of her sentences so tight, I was reminded of the old 1960’s ‘Dragnet’ TV show dialogue. I’m not sure it is better to me than to what I’ve become accustomed in reading the previous four books in the series, but oh well. Brennan is in Guatemala helping Mateo Reyes and others from the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation dig up the bones of victims raped and killed by government soldiers and the rebels fighting the government in a civil war which took place a few decades ago. While the government’s murders have stopped, nobody was ever held accountable. Many innocent children and women were slaughtered and the lives of thousands of Guatemalan’s citizens were destroyed, impoverishing the survivors even more deeply than they had been. Brennan is helping one of the organizations which are trying to bring recognition and names to the anonymous bones, but it is dangerous work. Guatemala’s current government and police forces have many employed who were murdering innocent citizens during the civil war. When the Canadian Embassy insists Brennan interrupt her work to excavate a body from a septic tank for SICA (Special Crimes Investigative Unit, Guatemala National Civil Police) and help Sergeant-detective Bartolome Galiano, who is a very attractive man, at first she is irate. She IS one of the few specialists who has knowledge how to remove a deteriorating body from such a horrendous environment while saving as much forensic material as possible, but under the circumstances, she feels no need to help Guatemalan officials. However, Galiano explains four girls are missing, and one of them is Andre Specter’s daughter, Chantale. Specter is the Canadian Ambassador to Guatemala. She cannot refuse when she understands 4 sets of worried parents are desperate to know if the body in the tank is their daughter. Then, after Brennan has finished her dump-diving, she finds herself working with Canadian detective Andrew Ryan who is unexpectedly sent down to Guatemala. He happens to speak Spanish and it seems he is also an old friend of Galiano’s. She is invaluable to them in interpreting the science they use on the bodies which start inevitably to turn up, and some of the suspects find talking to her much easier than the male detectives. As usual, the mystery takes many turns and the suspects are not all involved with the Canadian’s ambassador's family, but they have other really awful secrets which they will kill to keep secret. There are a LOT of coincidences that bring Brennan and Ryan together, as well as some excessive stretching of reality that these two would be so essential to helping Galiano solve a few crimes, especially when it becomes apparent the disappearance of the Canadian girl is peripheral to both the actual underlying mystery and the bone recovery effort of Guatemala’s civil war. I found all of the amazing maneuvering a bit too amazing for a couple of foreigners to pick up so quickly in a country that was not very welcoming and so culturally different. However, it is an entertaining novel with axes to grind which happen to match the same axes I often pick up to grind, too.
#5 in the Tempe Brennan series. Finalist 2003 Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel.Tempe Brennan series - Grave Secrets finds Tempe plying her pathology trade in Guatemala, investigating a massacre site as a favor to a Guatemalan anthropology association. However, when her team is ambushed by gunmen, Tempe finds herself ensnared in a mesh of corruption and murder stretching from Guatemala City to Montreal, involving DAs, military thugs and kinky diplomats. Tempe finds herself drawn and trapped between the two cops investigating: her longtime Canadian suitor, Lt. Andrew Ryan, and her would-be Latin lover, agente Bartolom Galiano. That the two men know each other and are friends doesn't help the situation. When a nosy reporter looking into the massacre is gunned down before Tempe's eyes, she realizes she herself is the next likely target.
—Ed
I'm afraid this book just didn't do it for me, and it has fallen foul of my "100 page" rule. I just couldn't get into the writing, the characters or the storyline. I really didn't care about "Tempe Brennan" and spent most of my time reading this wondering why crime writers can't call their main characters Jane Brown or Sarah Jones (cf Cornwell's "Scarpetta" and Grafton's "Kinsey Millhone"). It also irritated me that this was another "female away from home/family" who wistfully dreams of her relationship with the "wrong" man (who always seems to have "crags" in all the right places!).In short, there just didn't seem to be anything new in this novel I hadn't read elsewhere.
—Babs Hobbs
Este libro está escrito por una antropóloga forense y la historia está basada en Guatemala. La heroína es también una antropóloga forense que está excavando en Guatemala y analizando los huesos de 23 personas. La historia es interesante, la narrativa algo confusa pero fácil de leer. Sin embargo, me decepcionó mucho ver que a pesar que haya sido escrito por una antropóloga y haya sido editado posteriormente, que aún hubieran varias faltas de ortografía y gramática en las conversaciones en español. Por si fuera poco, las expresiones que la heroína decía en español no existen en la lengua española (Ex. "Mucho terrífico", "No Problemo"), y supuestamente su español es lo suficientemente bueno como para traducir una terminología científica. Aunque estas expresiones sí existen en inglés (desafortunadamente), para lectores cuya lengua materna es el español y leen el libro en inglés, esos detalles se vuelven bastante molestos en el transcurso de la historia. No he leído ningún otro libro de esta serie, pero pienso que mientras no estén basados en algún lugar de lengua española la historia podrá ser disfrutada más
—Ayumi
