Product Description

A plane crashes high in the mountains of North Carolina. But a severed foot is discovered a good distance from the main crash site...Forensic antrhopologiest Dr Temperance Brennan is first on the scene. The task that confronts her is a sad and sickening one, and her investigation seems to be throwing up more questions than it answers. But when Tempe makes a discovery that raises dangerous questions, her professional standing is threatened. Convinced that another corpse lies in the woods, Tempe pits herself against a conspiracy of silence, and uncovers a shocking tale of deceit and depravity...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5026 in Books
• Published on: 2002-03-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 464 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Tempe Brennan, Kathy Reichs' forensic anthropologist heroine, often finds herself in physical jeopardy. In Fatal Voyage, her fourth outing, someone is trying to kill her and also to destroy her professional reputation with trumped-up charges of unethical behaviour.

Tempe is called in when a plane full of college athletes goes down in the remoter parts of the forests of North Carolina. She finds herself investigating a spare foot she rescued from coyotes, a foot which is significantly more decomposed than the crash victims and which has symptoms of gout, a disease most of the dead young people had no time to contract. There is a locked house and walled courtyard out in the woods that do not appear on any maps and it seems almost as if her simple knowledge of their being there has offended the powerful of the world.

As always, Kathy Reichs manages to combine a detailed knowledge of who the dead were and how they died with a profound sense of the sadness of things. This is a book that never lets us forget amid the dissections and tests for genetic markers that each human death is that of a tragic and irreplaceable human being. Tempe is one of the more attractive of the current crop of women detectives simply because she is flawed and vulnerable as well as smart, righteous and brave. Reichs never lets you forget that crime novels should acquaint us with good people as well as human evil. --Roz Kaveney

Review
Called to the scene of a major airplane crash, forensic anthropologist Tempe Brennan's preliminary investigations put her on the trail of another mystery when she literally stumbles upon a severed foot that does not appear to belong to any of the passengers. Before she can make any real progress with either case, however, her life is disrupted by false accusations of malpractice, which lead to her suspension. Even worse, she cannot get in touch with her daughter, Katy, and has reason to believe she might have been on the ill-fated plane. Set in the forested mountains of North Carolina, as summer turns to autumn, Fatal Voyage is packed with detail of the physical landscape at the disaster scene and its surrounding environment, which effectively highlights the twists and turns of this intricately plotted thriller. This is not another formula crime novel: Reichs's heroine is fittingly moved by the trauma she witnesses, and never loses sight of the humanity of the victims whose untimely deaths she investigates. (Kirkus UK)

Frances Fyfield
'Read this and you’ll know why the word ‘chiller’ was invented’