Deja Dead By Kathy Reichs

Temperance Brennan (Tempe for short) is an anthropologist who works in North Carolina and Quebec: the story takes place in Quebec. An anthropologist is someone who works with skeletons. Tempe works for a place where bodies are identified and the cause of death are figured out. But her job there is to figure all these things out when only a skeleton is found. In this book a part of a body is found by some workers so Tempe gets called in because the body part was decomposed beyond recognition and to see if they are human remains. When she gets there she finds they are human but some body parts are mising so she looks for them and finds them scattered in plastic bags all over the forest floor. Later they find another body in the same condition but in a different area of town, and then another. The detective she works with refuses to believe its the work of a serial killer but Tempe thinks it is, so she tries to figure out who is behind all of these murders. As she keeps digging, she finds evidence that her life may be in danger and the life of her friend, but she decides to keep going. As she gets deeper into this case her best friend goes missing and is eventually found dead. So as she figures out this case she is going through the loss of a friend, the fear that this killer is planning to kill her, and family troubles at home in North Carolina where her daughter wants to drop out of school and go off with her boyfriend somewhere.