Fans of Reich’s novels have come to expect lots of technical detail about forensics and its related fields, and they won’t be disappointed here. Reichs certainly knows her stuff, and she teaches us all sorts of fascinating things. The novel’s got one great plot twist, something I don’t think you’ll see coming. Reich is very, very good at crafting a story. If only she were as expert at telling it…

I like her novels, but they don’t seem to be getting any, well, better written. She still seems to use clichés and shopworn phrases when she could come up with something new (“My own blood hammered in my ears,” she writes at one point), and she still brings us up short with wildly inappropriate comments (she describes one character as “pretty and thirty-something, with a quick smile and 36Ds,” and do we really need to know how big her breasts are?). Too many of her supporting characters seem to have wandered in out of other people’s novels, or are so vaguely described that we forget them the moment their scenes have ended.

I don’t mean to sound overly critical, but if Reichs could somehow manage to sharpen her narrative skills, bring them in line with her excellent plotting abilities, she’d produce a novel that was truly great. As it is, Grave Secrets, like her previous offerings, is merely good.

--David Pitt