Kathy Reichs is a forensic anthropologist for the Offices of the Chief Medical Examiner, State of North Carolina, and for the Laboratorie de Sciences Judiciaires et de M-decine L-gale for the province of Quebec. She is also a professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, she divides her time between Charlotte and Montreal and is a frequent expert witness in criminal trials. How she finds the time to write such well researched and exciting novels is anyone's guess. Dr. Brennan's students are working at the site of some prehistoric graves on an island north of Charleston, South Carolina, when they find a body in a shallow grave off a lonely beach. But this body certainly is not prehistoric. The body is in a state of decomposition, the skeleton is articulated and the bone structure fresh and some of the vertebrae are still connected by soft-tissue. The remains are still encased in whatever the owner was wearing and there are still wisps of blond hair. This is a case Tempe must take. Dental records and skeletal gender and other indicators suggest that the deceased is a middle aged white male, but who was he, why is he in a shallow grave and what does a vertical hairline fracture of the cervical vertebrae signify . . .