[.ca] Written in Bone (ISBN 0385340052)

"Watching them all, warmly at ease with each other, I was suddenly acutely aware that I didn't belong.":
Atmospheric and bleak and bathed in a single-mined authenticity, this fast-paced police procedural, the second for Simon Beckett and his hero David Hunter, takes place on Runa, a small island in the Outer Hebrides. This is where forensic anthropologist David comes to unravel a grisly discovery, a body that has been burned almost beyond recognition and left to rot in an abandoned and dilapidated cottage situated miles from anywhere. David is at a particularly sensitive place in his life when thrust into this mystery. For the past eighteen months he's been living in London and based at the forensic department of City's university. But recently he's been spending for more time working out in the field, much to the disappointment of his girlfriend Jenny. Determined to spend more time working on his relationship, David is not quite sure how to react when the phone rings and DS Graham Wallace of the Northern Force Headquarters in Inverness asks him if he will investigate this strange fire death out in wilds of the Western Isles. The death doesn't sound particularly suspicious. It might even be a suicide, but is more likely to be a drunk or a vagrant who fell asleep too close to the campfire. Still, there seems to be something odd about it and the facts just don't seem to add up. A retired Detective Inspector by the name of Andrew Brody who lives out there now had called it in and Wallace is desperate for David to give the department an expert assessment of the situation. Soon enough David is on the ferry from Stornoway and as the turbulent sea crashes against the craft, for the first time the young anthropologist gets to see the rugged landscape of Runa as it gradually appears before him, a treeless vista, windswept and bleak, and in the distance the skyline dominated by the brooding peak of Bodach Runa, the Old Man of Runa, its tip lost in the mist of low clouds, always beautiful but also quite desolate. It is also on the Stornoway ferry that David meets some of the local inhabitants, many of whom will play a pivotal role in the story: the embittered and alcoholic Sergeant Fraser, who resents the intrusion into the Island of outsiders, particularly that of wealthy South African couple Andrew and Grace Strachan who have been investing in the island; the affable PC Duncan McKinney whose innocence causes him to become caught up in the investigation; and local journalist Maggie Cassidy whose diminutive exterior conceals the fact that she will stop at nothing to get to the heart of a good story. When David first comes across the crime scene he notices the first faint and sooty whiff of combustion, the smell coming right from the center of the ramshackle cottage. There is precious little left of what might have been a living person, the body reduced to ash, an untidy pile of greasy residue and cinders that lay on the floor. But what really shocks David is the sight of two unburned feet and a single hand protruding from the ashes, the bones jutting from them, completely unmarked and scorched to blackened sticks. The remains are quickly identified as that of a woman with David hurriedly concluding that it looks like murder even if he can't tell Brody and Fraser for certain that it isn't. There's also no way of knowing what may be hidden under the ashes and he doesn't want to risk contaminating the scene. But when he finds that the body had been hit hard on the back of its skull by a blunt object, David is sure that this is no accident. Somebody had killed the woman and then set fire to the body. So it is here amidst this derelict cottage, with its sagging ceilings and crumbling walls, that author Simon Beckett sets David on a course of murder and pandemonium where he finds himself cut off from the outside world and forced to rely on his survival instincts. The stink of burned flesh and bone combines with an icy winter storm that crashes into the Island, the weather, just like Runa itself saving the worst till last. Whatever secrets Runa holds, David is convinced that it won't give them up so easily. As in The Chemistry of Death, Beckett once again does a truly admirable job of bringing David's talents to life, juxtaposing his calm professionalism and analytical analysis of the burnt and torched bodies with his flailing emotions as he gradually gets caught up in the lives of the people of Runa. Fitting the fragments together is no easy task, a mission that is made even more sinister by Ancient burial cairns and hooded figures traipsing through rain-soaked landscapes, the evil forces alive in the form of long held animosities, history forever written in charred bones of the dead. Mike Leonard January 08.