Temperance Brennan swims to consciousness, queasily aware that her feet are painfully tied to her hands. She finds that she is in an enclosed space, and keeps her fear at bay by remembering what she has been doing recently -- travelling with the body of an heiress to a Chicago morgue. Does this have something to do with her grim predicament? Or is it concerned with a recent phone call, an accusation of abuse of practice in the pathology lab? But the man who could have … mehrshed light on this call is deadWith 206 Bones, we're back in the world of Kathy Reichs' resourceful forensic pathologist Dr Temperance Brennan, and it's territory that crime fiction admirers have come to love.The relationship between Brennan and her colleague Ryan (with whom she was transporting the dead woman's remains) is as sharply handled as anything in previous Reichs novels, and that's no mean achievement -- the often caustic interaction between Tempe, her friends, relatives and colleagues has been one of the pleasures of the series. Here, the narrative has greater urgency than weve seen in some time; Reichs' beleaguered protagonist has to draw together the cases of three murdered women to solve a lethal mystery -- and, whats more, she has to deal with the possibility of sabotage by a fellow member of her forensic laboratory.Katy Reichs' debut novel Déjà Dead was as impressive a calling card as any author might aspire to. Reichs' strong-minded heroine was utterly plausible, and her creator subsequently placed her in plots that were as well-engineered as anything in the genre. Needless to say, the unflinching confrontation with the grimmer side of human behavior quickly ensured that Reichs' books were not for the squeamish, but for those with a taste for the strongest variety of crime writing, her books quickly became unmissable. And 206 Bones -- with its dark mysteries involving the bodies of dead women -- is Reichs on top form. -- Barry Forshaw weniger