I like Tempe Brennan. I really do. I like the mistakes she makes in her personal life while being so brilliant in her professional life, so I enjoyed her continuing to do the same in DEADLY DECISIONS, the third book of Kathy Reichs's series with the forensic anthropologist at its center. I like the fact that she gets muddy and dirty and has messy hair, and I don't even mind too much that Tempe will always tell you about everybody else's hair before she tells you anything else about them.

Reichs's main character is her next-to-greatest strength in these books (this one was preceded by DEATH DU JOUR and DEJA DEAD). Her greatest strength is in recounting the gruesome details of her protagonist's work, which she knows so well, since that is the author's work too. I am not offended by the fact that the pieces she must put together in order to solve her puzzles are pieces of dead people --- sometimes even recently dead people killed by bomb blasts, as is the case in the opening pages of this book. I find all puzzles fascinating whether made of dead flesh or bones or crosswords or jigsawed cardboard. The fact that Tempe's first two human jigsaw puzzles were identical (monozygotic --- see, I even like the big words these books are full of) twins wasn't too much of a coincidence for me. At least not for starters.

But I can't say the same for the rest of this book. After a promising beginning, DEADLY DECISIONS quickly starts to fall apart, and I'd be doing a disservice to Bookreporter's readers if I failed to come right out and say so. Nevertheless, if you keep on reading (as I did because I had to), you may be OK --- just as long as you read for the details only.

There is a lot of information here. In addition to that which comes to Dr. Reichs naturally through knowing her job, she has proved that she worked hard and did a lot of extra research to write this book. You can learn a lot about OMCs (Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs), both in this country and in Canada, that you probably didn't know before. You can also learn about the various kinds of hydrocephaly that strike at different ages, all the ways it can be treated, the different types of shunts that are used, and the advantages and disadvantages of each, plus the depressing fact that there is no cure for hydrocephalus.

Wait, there's more! You can learn the whole history of the NCIC (National Crime Information Center) in this country, and the CPIC (same deal in Canada). And in one dazzling display of out-Cornwelling Patricia, Kathy Reichs reels off the FBI acronyms of Quantico with a brilliant familiarity that will make your head spin.

The only trouble is, you learn these things not in the course of telling the story, not woven into the narrative in any skillful way; instead she just stops the forward story progression and dumps the information on the reader in a page or two. All at once. As if she'd had a Post-it marked "OMC research insert here."

This clumsy technique is not exactly Kathy Reichs's fault. She is not primarily a writer. She was trained to be a forensic anthropologist and has the degrees to prove it. Scribner chose her for the celebrity factor, and are paying her about a million bucks per book (one has heard) to fill the giant hole left in their lineup when Patricia Cornwell left for greener pastures. So when Kathy Reichs does not write well, I fault the publisher for not giving her good editorial support; she's an intelligent woman with a lot of writing ability --- she just needs help. She needs it badly in this book, which is full of such mistakes as the one previously mentioned.

To mention another glaring problem: There are far too many coincidences, such as another case that just happens to have a corpse originally buried in North Carolina end up --- crucial pieces of it, anyhow --- in Montreal. Now come on. How often are we to expect these exchanges of bodies or body parts between two such distant and hardly related places? The last book had strained my credulity to the breaking point on this particular issue by the end. This book just plain broke it.

Problems like this are amateurish. They can be easily fixed. All that is needed is an editor with patience and a publication schedule with enough flexibility to allow time for the author to rework the part with the problem.

And while these peripheral problems are being fixed, I wish her editor would tell Dr. Reichs that just because one of the victims is an innocent child does not guarantee that the reader will be hooked into reading over 400 pages, even if any crime against a child, slender though that thread may be, is enough (apparently) for Tempe Brennan to leave her usual duties and get permission to run around with the police and the FBI the way Kay Scarpetta does just because she's Kay Scarpetta. A novel needs a plot --- that's the part with the beginning, the middle, and the end, you know --- in order to keep all the gruesome descriptions hanging together.

Somehow the plot part seems to have gone missing in DEADLY DECISIONS. It's a pity, because with some help from her editor, or her agent, or even at last resort (am I giving away trade secrets here?) a writer-for-hire, Kathy Reichs could continue to write books that fulfill the promise I thought I saw in DEJA DEAD.

   --- Reviewed by Dianne Day, author of the Fremont Jones Mysteries, including EMPEROR NORTON'S GHOST, due in paperback in June from Bantam Books; visit Dianne's website at http://www.dianneday.com.

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