I'm told my books are popular in prisons...
| Published date | 13 August 2022 |
| Publication title | Huddersfield Daily Examiner |
Over her career, she has helped identify human remains from 9/11, World War Two and the Korean War, and travelled to Rwanda to testify at the UN tribunal on genocide.
I remember first one, used for Dead [her novel] serial case in On how her inspired
Not much spooks the 74-year-old, creator of the Temperance Brennan novel series and producer and writer of the hit TV series Bones, crime writing which was based on Kathy's characters and work, running on Fox TV for 12 years.
On some level, she got used to the smell of death when working on cases, she reflects.
"You know, at Thanksgiving, you come into your home and smell something wonderful cooking, but after an hour you don't smell it any more, because your nose numbs to it. It's the same with bad smells.
"There are some cops I know who would put coffee grounds under their noses. I never did that. The rooms where I was working had specific ventilation systems for particularly bad cases - we called them the stinky rooms."
Her wealth of experience has provided a rich harvest of stories, which she has drawn on for bestselling novels starring her forensic heroine Temperance (known as 'Tempe'), a divorced former alcoholic with a daughter and personal problems.
The latest, Cold, Cold Bones, her 21st in the series, sees Tempe find a box on her porch containing a fresh human eyeball, with GPS coordinates to a macabre discovery. More killings follow, and when her daughter Katy disappears she realises someone is targeting her.
"It goes back and recaps a lot of her career, revisiting many of her older cases - I thought my return readers would get a kick out of recognising that," Kathy explains.
the which I Deja
Does the book mirror the sort of cases she's worked on?
1997 a murder Montreal cases Kathy's "I've done some cases involving serial killers playing out their own malignant fantasies," she remembers. "I don't think I've ever been sent something sinister, although I've been sent letters from prisoners who went to jail partly because of my testimony. I'm told that my books are very popular in prisons, and way back I taught in a maximum security prison for five or six years."
These days, Kathy is virtually retired from forensic anthropology, although she is currently indirectly consulting on a case in South America, and will be attending the annual meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Science - so...
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