Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice ( The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. The real problem here is the number of independent malefactors working at cross-purposes to keep the population down.Īnother sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.Ī week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Elliott’s wake, that’s no more than a convention of the genre.

Though the locals complain that murder victims seem to pile up in Dr.

Elliot’s girlfriend, you have to wonder if he’s asking you to accept a little too much of the cozy gardens of Bensham. But when McCarthy, whose métier is grisly forensics ( Soul Seeker, 2011, etc.), adds an accidental death, a suicide, a threatening ex-brother-in-law and whoever killed the pet rabbit of veterinarian Maxine Christy, Dr. But then why would someone go on to drown biology teacher Jeremy Gillman and leave him with a frog in his mouth? The link between each dead teacher and the symbol of his or her subject matter seems promising. Yvette, it turns out, was much more than just Marlene’s landlady, and their unorthodox domestic arrangements may well have inflamed murderous passions. Case closed-until Yvette Mangon, a math teacher at Bensham Manor, is stabbed to death with a compass. Inspector Masson duly arrests caretaker George Cotterill, whose dicky heart gives out while he’s in custody. After all, it’s widely assumed that Thornton Heath physician Lance Elliot-whose father’s inamorata, Ada Clarke, is the head dinner lady at the school-attracts corpses wherever he goes. Nobody at Bensham Manor School thinks it greatly amiss when PE teacher Marlene Jeffries is bashed to death with a dumbbell. Lance Elliot ( Dying to Know, 2010) returns to deal with the ever-widening contagion of homicide that bids fair to decimate Croydon.

Nor All Thy Tears by Gerry Burnie