Flash and Bones

Book excerpt: In the riveting fourteenth novel in the #1 New York Times bestselling Temperance Brennan series by Kathy Reichs, a dead body is discovered near the North Carolina speedway right before a NASCAR competition is scheduled to begin. Just as 200,000 fans begin pouring into Charlotte, North Carolina for Raceweek, a body is found in a barrel of asphalt in a landfill next to the Lowes Motor Speedway. The following day, a NASCAR crew member visits Temperance Brennan at the MCME and tells her that his sister, Cyndi Gamble, an aspiring NASCAR driver, and her boyfriend, Cale Lovett, mysteriously disappeared twelve years earlier. Could the body be Cyndi’s? Or Cale’s? As Tempe delves into the old case, secrets begin to surface. Brennan learns that, because of Lovett’s association with right wing extremists, the FBI had joined the investigation at the time of the pair’s disappearance, only to then terminate the search a short while later. Was it a cover-up? Or a simple open-and-shut case? As Tempe considers multiple theories, another man, Ted Raines, goes missing in Charlotte. An employee of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Raines was in town for the big race. So when Tempe’s tests finds a surprising, secret substance mixed in with the remains in the barrel, Tempe wonders just what Raines was up to…or if the body might be his. As she struggles to uncover who is hiding what, Tempe discovers just how far the government is willing to go to keep its secrets safe.