Death du Jour - Kathy Reichs

This book 2 in Kathy Reichs's Temperance Brennan series. Although I've already read 1 or 2 out of order I decided to joing a bookring of all her books so I can fully understand the story and enjoy them,. And I do want to enjoy them very much! Unfortunately I was a bit disappointed in this one.

March in Montreal: It is a bitterly cold night and in the grounds of an old church forensic anthropologist Dr Temperance Brennan digs carefully. She is there to exhume the remains of a nun proposed for sainthood. But the body has been moved to an unmarked grave in a far corner of the cemetery. What will Tempe discover when the frozen ground finally yields to her tools?Just hours later, Tempe is called to the scene of an horrific arson. A young family has perished, and there seems to be no witness, no motive, no explanation.From the charred remains of the arson, to a trail of sinister cult activity and a terrifying showdown during an ice storm, Tempe gathers her evidence and confronts the terror of a killer out of control. 'Another day. Another death. Death du Jour. My God, how many such days would there be?'

I think I had 2 main problems with this story. One is that there are too many cases being treated and analysed. Tempe jumps from one to another and I sometimes had to go back and see where we had left off the last time. The first case is a dead nun whose grave she is trying to find and after a while you realise that there's some problem/revelation connected with it. Well I spent the rest of the book thinking what it could be as Tempe jumps through all the cases and only in the very it is revealed. I was a bit annoyed by then.
Then she keeps reaching conclusions and having revelations but we are never told what she finds out or what it means. I find that I like to be a part of the investigation, I like to know what the characters are thinking and why they do what they do. This lack of knowledge kept me frustrated! Then we don't really get to know Tempe, I think we knew her better in book 1, in this one she has no particular friends, her house doesn't seem all that cozy and revealing of her character and we don't have any information on her likes and dislikes. I was expecting something else with less action and more character development.

Grade: B-

Oh and do you see on that cover that it says - Better than Patricia Cornwell? Sorry but at least for me that's certainly not true!