Bones
by Jan Burke
Summary
Nick Parrish is the worst thing the state of California has in custody, a serial killer of women who has never given up his count, and the deal his lawyers strike is the book's engine: in exchange for life instead of the needle, he will lead an expedition into the Sierra Nevada to the grave of Julia Sayre, a mother of two whose disappearance reporter Irene Kelly has carried for years. The party that hikes in, prosecutors, guards, forensic anthropologists, a cadaver dog and her handler, Irene as witness for the victim's family, does everything right, and it does not matter: the grave is booby trapped, the mountain meadow becomes a crime scene of Parrish's own design, and the killer walks out of the wreckage free, with most of the expedition dead behind him and one survivor selected, by name, for later.
The novel's second half is the hunt inverted. Irene, home in Las Piernas with her cop husband Frank and a case of survivor's guilt the book takes seriously, becomes the fixed point of Parrish's attention, letters, intrusions, the escalating courtship of a predator who has decided his best audience should also be his masterpiece, while she and the remains of the task force work the old disappearances for the pattern that will predict him. Burke plays the forensic material straight, bones read like documents, the dog scenes among the best in the genre, and the finale pays the terror off at close range.
Around three hundred and eighty pages.
Best for readers who want the serial killer thriller run through a journalist's eyes, with the wilderness set piece that made its reputation.
Historical Context & Significance
Bones won the Edgar for Best Novel in 2000, the breakout of Jan Burke's Irene Kelly series, seven books of Southern California newspaper procedural suddenly escalated into thriller territory, and the win was received as validation for the reporter heroine at the exact moment newsroom crime fiction was fading with the newsrooms themselves.
Burke converted the book's forensic research into a second career: she founded the Crime Lab Project, a nonprofit lobbying for public forensic science funding, becoming one of the genre's genuine policy advocates, advocating and organising where most writers only acknowledge sources, and the anthropology in Bones, vetted by the practitioners, is part of why working forensic scientists adopted her.
Parrish proved too effective to retire, returning in Disturbance more than a decade later; the series and its author collected the field's service honours alongside the Edgar, the writer as infrastructure again.