Rating: 
Summary: What a disappointment!
Review: Kathy Reichs' first book was excellent, her second a good follow-up, but alas not her third. If you are looking for information - on forensics, anthropology, cranial implants and heaven-knows what else - then you'll probably enjoy it. Personally I prefer a good story, and characters I care about. Deadly Décisions has neither. Ms Reich seems to lack the ability to weave information into the plot without the reader feeling he/she is being lectured. Wading through this morass of facts, I convinced myself the book was a slow starter. It wasn't: it was a non-starter, predictable, guessable and utterly putdownable. So if you're thinking of reading Kathy Reichs for the first time, go for Déja Dead or Death du Jour - and give Deadly Decisions a wide berth.
Rating:
Summary: Biker gangs are bad.
Review: Biker gangs occupy a place in Deadly Decisions that is similar to the one occupied by cults in her last book. They represent a villain whose threat to society is only brought home to the main character when it begins to touch her family. This time, forensic scientist Temperance Brennan is pulled deeply into the world of biker gangs through her outrage at the death of an innocent. To her horror, her nephew Kit is fascinated by this deadly group of miscreants. She must solve a murder and still manage to keep Kit out of harm's way.Unfortunately, social evils and their victims are not a substitute for narrative antagonists and protagonists. Although Reichs is a skilled writer in many ways, with rich descriptions and a feel for the material, she seems unable to grapple with actual characters beyond the characters of Brennan and her immediate circle. The book has many other flaws-- plot points are very predictable, the coincidences are strong enough to make even the most forgiving reader wince, and the character relationships are superficial and unbelievable (with the exception of Temperance's response to her boyfriend's betrayal). I would not only wait for paperback, I would wait to borrow the paperback from the library.
Rating: 
Summary: Too much information!
Review: This novel is a mixed bag, with significant plusses and minuses. It revolves around Dr. Temperance Brannan, a forensic anthropologist who divides her time, as does the author, between Montreal, Canada, and North Carolina. The author is very knowledgable about her field and includes a lot of medical and anatomical detail about the victims and the crime scenes, but many readers are probably not as enamored of these details as author Reichs is. In this book there have been a number of murders between rival bicycle gangs. Brannan's job is to sort out and identify the victims, but she extends this to discovering the perpetrators, much to the chagrin of the investigators with whom she works. The insight into the organization and origination of biker gangs is interesting but again the author probably gives us more information than we need to know. The book is at its best when Reichs allows Brannen's character to demonstrate her human side when confronted with a rebellious nephew and the defection of her policeman boyfriend to a biker gang.
Rating:
Summary: Eh, all right
Review: There's nothing particularly wrong with Kathy Reichs' DEADLY DECISIONS, but there's nothing particularly right about it either. The plot, centered around a number of biker gang-related deaths, is serviceable, but I never found myself engrossed in it. I just wasn't that interested in who-done-it. I kept plodding through hoping to get hooked somewhere along the way, but closed the book after the last page thinking "so what". Reichs is a decent writer and her descriptions of the types of icky things a forensic pathologist does were interesting enough, I suppose. I won't say I'd never read another of her books, but I surely won't be rushing out to buy a first edition.
Rating:
Summary: Deadly Decisions -- do I read this or Scarpetta?
Review: The plot is relatively straight-forward in this third installment in the Dr. Temperance Brennan series: there are biker gangs in Montreal, and they're killing each other. Most of it happens in Montreal, which is an improvement over the bopping around in previous books. The story is interesting, but some of the characters are fast becoming clichés. And if you don't figure out a sub-plot about her love interest being a dirty cop, you need to take Mystery Fiction 101 again. Temperance also gets to play Mommy again, this time to a nephew, but it isn't particularly exciting. More of a Scarpetta rip-off. Again, too, Reichs plays fast and loose with a couple of clues that make Brennan look like an idiot to any intelligent reader and really detracts from the story. The final ending is almost surreal, and reads more like a script for some action TV-series than reliable fiction. Still, as negative as I sound, Reichs is still above average, just not up to the standards of the first book.
Rating: 
Summary: Another superb forensic thriller
Review: If you need a forensic fix but are tired of the increasingly tiresome Patricia Cornwell, check out Kathy Reichs. She delivers the science minus the insufferable protagonist, and does much better research on the plot incidentals. (Unlike Cornwell, Reichs' professional credentials are fully equal to those of her heroine.) This and her earlier books in the Tempe Brennan series are mysteries of a high order. A somewhat grim view of Canada, though: Reichs, like that notable Canadian poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen, has seen the future and it's murder.
Rating:
Summary: pretty good book
Review: It's pretty fast read... okay I guess...
Rating: 
Summary: GREAT READ
Review: This is my second Temperance Brennan book. In this one, Tempe tries to unravel a series of murders by outlaw biker gangs. The two that interest her most are the murder of a child in a crossfire and the bones of a sixteen year old girl found partly in Quebec and partly in Myrtle Beach. The novel moves fast, is pretty gory at times, and has a high body count. It definitely kept my interest.
Rating:
Summary: Tempe and the Biker War
Review: When a nine-year-old girl ends up dead in Montreal as the latest victim of an ongoing biker war, forensic anthropologist Tempe Brennan vows to help to find the killer. She joins a task force and with her we learn a lot about the groups involved. Vipers, Angels, Bandits, Heathens and so on. We learn who is affiliated with whom and who the warring factions are. Maybe this is a correct rendering of what's going on in Quebec, but in my opinion less would have been more here. It was simply impossible to remember all this information and put it to use throughout the book. Apart from that I found the story to be an interesting insight into a culture I know next to nothing about. A bombing gone bad leads to the discovery of two long dead bikers and skull and leg bones of a teenage girl with links to Tempe's second home, North Carolina. Kit, Tempe's nephew becomes increasingly fascinated with the biker culture and boyfriend Andrew Ryan is out of the picture as he's suspected of selling drugs. The story is a bit predictable but it's still fun to read. As with the first two books ("Deja Dead" and "Death Du Jour") coincidences keep piling up and, again, Ms Reichs cannot resist to lecture us about forensic details. This time it's blood splatters and while I usually enjoy reading about forensic science, she lost me pretty quick on this one. I liked the first two books better, but this one is still good enough for a rainy Sunday afternoon. If you're not desperate to read it though, I'd recommend to wait for the paperback.
Rating:
Summary: Implausible Plot
Review: From the author of "Deja Dead," this is the story of forensic sleuth Tempe Brennan returning to Montreal to track down the killer of a child caught in a crossfire of gang warfare. Sometimes predictable, sometimes boring, but always true to the tired Patricia Cornwell formula.
| 
