Kathy Reichs received a great deal of attention when her first novel was published. Many compared her to Patricia Cornwell, which was natural given that they each had a forensic scientist as the protagonist in their work. But when I read Déjà Dead, Reichs’s first novel, I was disappointed with the effort.

Obviously, much of the world disagreed with my opinion. Reichs has now published eight novels in the series, all of which have sold very well. I missed the intervening six installments of this series but was looking forward to reading the eighth and latest edition of Tempe Brennan’s adventures. Would I find Reichs’s work much improved, now worthy of comparison with Cornwell and other bestselling authors?

In a nutshell, no. Cross Bones is a more polished effort, but I still find the main characters, Brennan and Detective Andrew Ryan, two-dimensional. They are supposedly in a relationship, but they act more like colleagues who occasionally go through a nudge-nudge, wink-wink routine and then slip offstage to do something naughty.

This time the duo are trying to solve the murder of a Montreal businessman.The case becomes more complicated when a man shows up at the autopsy and gives Brennan a photograph of a 2,000-year-old skeleton. He says the skeleton is the reason for the businessman’s death. The photo leads to the skeleton and evidence suggests that it may be one of the skeletons found in Israel at Masada in the mid-1960s. It’s even possible that these are the bones of Jesus Christ.

Brennan and Ryan travel to Israel to return the skeleton and to track down its connection to the murder they’re trying to solve. This is an interesting premise, but ultimately the novel is a mystery about bones and whether they might belong to one J.C. While the plot revolves around the discovery of bones in Israel, the murder of the Montreal businessman begins to seem like something that happened a long time ago.

Reichs does tie everything together at the end, but she had lost me long before that. Nonetheless, I have no doubt that her many fans will enjoy this offering and propel it up the bestseller lists.