Barbara Ludman
DEATH DU JOUR by Kathy Reichs (William Heinemann)
Comparisons are useful, and inevitable, when looking at a series of thrillers featuring a female forensic pathologist. Kathy Reichs treads a path hacked out by Patricia Cornwell; so how does she compare?
Reichs’s settings are more exotic: her heroine, the oddly named Dr Temperance Brennan, spends several months each year working with police in Montreal, whereas Cornwell’s heroine, Dr Kay Scarpetta, is pretty much based in Richmond, Virginia, travelling occasionally up and down the east coast.
Scarpetta comes up against more inventive killers, although Brennan has to deal with killers as psychotic as any Scarpetta might encounter in a dark alley outside the sluice room. The killers Brennan deals with are seriously misogynistic, whereas Scarpetta’s foes will torture and kill men as readily as women.
One reads thrillers featuring forensic pathologists for the autopsies, and there they’re pretty much even, cutting into corpses, sending innards away for analysis, boiling bones – Brennan prefers to let them soak, claiming boiling might damage faint marks left by weapons – discerning the cause of death, and more, from a mark, a stain, a tooth, a maggot. Cornwell does this sort of thing very well. Reichs does it with delight, as if just beginning to discover the joys of the autopsy room, but she ought to fight against her compulsion to lecture the reader on arcane points of bone lore.
Still, Reichs seems the better writer, although Cornwell is getting better all the time.
There are two books by Reichs out at the moment, released to coincide with the author’s South African trip. In her first book, Dj Dead, our heroine tracks a sadistic serial sex killer. In the newest book – Death du Jour – it’s young women being horribly murdered again, but also a children and a couple of men. There’s a cult connection, which gives the book immediacy as well as credibility, and an investigation into the origins of a long- dead nun being proposed for beatification. Overall, it’s quite a good book.