Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice ( The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Happily for fans, Dunning, a rare-book dealer himself, plans further Janeway books.Īnother sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.Ī week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Moreover, the mystery holds its own with the atmospherics. Janeway, who can be tough, sensitive, and passionate, is a credible hero, both as cop and as book-lover. Then a book-scout friend of Bobby's and the estimable Miss Pride are executed at Twice Told Books, and Janeway ups his investigative pace, which involves meetings (and romance) with a highly secretive rare-book dealer scrutiny of a collection appraisal and schmoozing with the owners along Book Row, until an alibi, like some book spines, cracks. As Janeway goes deeper and deeper into the book business, he manages to pinpoint Bobby's last day-the book dealers he sold to, the collector he bought from, and the big score he was double-crossed out of. And, on his own time, works on a case that the Denver force has no leads on: the murder of book scout Bobby Westfall. Long a collector and frequenter of Denver's Book Row, Janeway rents space, hires the charmingly efficient Miss Pride as his assistant, and opens Twice Told Books. Cliff Janeway quits the force when he is suspended pending the outcome of brutality charges brought by his nemesis, Jackie Newton.

Dunning, twice nominated for the Edgar (a pair of paperbacks), deserves to win one for this Denver cop-turned-bookman tale-a lively, seductive primer on how to open a bookstore, spot a first edition, warehouse it, price it, and enjoy it for its own sake.

Cliff janeway