Break No Bones

A Dr Temperance Brennan story, dealing with the work of forensic anthropologists. While pathologists examine soft tissue and organs to unravel a death, forensic anthropologists work with hard tissue (bones) towards achieving the same aim, establishing cause of death.

This story starts with Dr Brennan and her students doing some field work on an island in South Carolina suspected of being a burial ground for ancient Native Americans. The discovery of a relatively fresh corpse going back only a few years starts a gradual investigation that ends up unraveling a professional serial killer. As the skeleton is being examined, two other bodies quickly turn up. All bear similar odd marks on the skeleton, eventually turning out to having been made by a scalpel. A doctor running a “free” medical clinic for the poor has been killing some of his patients (that he figured won’t be missed) by strangulation, harvesting their organs for use in transplants across the border in Mexico, with wealthy sick Americans benefiting. He was caught at the dying moment, but then made a deal with the authorities escaping death penalty in exchange for identifying his victims and accomplices and how their scheme was hatched and operated.
This is actually an eye-opener into the international organ transplant business, in which people from poor countries either get killed for their organs or are encouraged to donate them for peanuts while the middlemen and professionals carrying out the operations profit greatly.

January 17, 2015. Review initially written in 2014. Novel first published in 2006 by Scribner, this Pocket Books edition being published in 2007, ISBN 0-7434-5303-4.