Great story. Crime/mystery with good details. Good research with few if any errors ( )

Carved in Bone is a book that's been sitting on my To-Be-Read shelves for years, and now was the time that I was in the mood to read it. It is a tale well told, with an interesting main character and lots of information to share.

Jefferson Bass does an excellent job in placing readers in the hills and hollows of eastern Tennessee, where people's memories are long and their willingness to forget and forgive microscopically short. The scenes in the cave are particularly well done, and they had me looking for a way out the entire time Brockton was down there. I also liked how Bass could go into forensic detail without graphic and gory detail.

If you like the subject of forensics, and let's face it, that's probably the main reason why readers would pick up a Body Farm mystery-- there's much to be learned here. I think the nugget of information that impressed me the most was about children's fingerprints. (Before puberty, a child's fingerprints are water-based and evaporate, which is one reason why finding missing children can be so difficult.)

There's a lot of good to be found in this first Body Farm mystery. The mystery was first-rate, and I thought the setting was excellent, but, ultimately, Dr. Bill Brockton did not "grab me" enough to make me want to continue reading the series. Your mileage may certainly vary. ( )

I started this series. I've not read anything by these two writers, but I enjoyed the rich details of the writing. Good mystery as well. ( )

Interesting book, good forensic details. Kept me guessing until the end. ( )

Body Farm. Readers who might have dabbled in the Kay Scarpetta series will recall references to the place. This book has shown up in my Goodreads recommendations for a while now, so I thought I'd give it a shot. Whatever my expectations were, this book ended up being a HUGE let down.

The first few pages draw you in, I must admit. The concept of Body Farm itself has a morbid but nonetheless intriguing appeal to it, and the first few pages of the book live up to it. Renowned forensic anthropologist Bill Brockton is requested by the County Sheriff's office to look at some remains they've found in a cave. The remains turn out to be 30 years old, and well-preserved, and it might just be possible to catch the killer after all this time. Adding to this premise are some wonderful insights into the world of forensic anthropology.

But the book goes only downhill from here. The protagonist is a middle-aged white man who goes into unnecessary, irrelevant, and completely sexist descriptions about the women around him. He spares no female character in the book- his undergraduate students, his grad student, a colleague, or women he refers to in conversation with the male characters. All of it is INAPPROPRIATE, and while it happens in real life, made me wonder how the editors condoned it.

Then there's the plot itself- watered down with so many situations that are over-the-top and completely irrelevant to the central mystery. I skimmed through a lot of the pages, and realized it made no difference to the reveal at the end. You can predict who the killer is and surmise the situations leading to the murder pretty early in the book, but boy this book took FOREVER to get to the conclusion.

If this book pops up in your Goodreads recommendations, as it did in mine, I'd say scroll right past it. There are far better mysteries/crime procedurals out there. ( )