Temperance Brennan follows the tangled path of a drowning victim who's evidently been dead and buried for over 50 years.

John Charles Lowery, of Lumberton, N.C., died in Vietnam in 1968. So how can fingerprint evidence identify him as the man who died of autoerotic asphyxia in a pond outside Hemmingford, Quebec? Luckily for him, Lowery, aka Spider, has attracted the attention of Temperance, who has roots in both Quebec, where she works as a forensic anthropologist, and North Carolina, where she grew up. Even more luckily, Tempe (206 Bones, 2009, etc.) so charms Spider's grieving father, Plato, that he insists she accompany the remains to the Central Identification Laboratory in Honolulu to establish once and for all what became of his son. No sooner has Tempe arrived in the islands with her daughter Katy, whose aid-worker boyfriend has just been killed by a roadside bomb outside Kabul, than flamboyant Honolulu Chief Medical Examiner Hadley Perry summons her to another command performance, the identification of some leftover bones that are all that remain from a recent shark attack. Both victims seem to be members of the Sons of Samoa, a gang of enforcers connected to local crime lord Nickie Lapasa, whose brother went missing in Vietnam in 1968—and perhaps to Spider Lowery as well.

Enough forensic examinations, misidentifications, genetic anomalies and coincidences for a whole season of snappy Tempe's TV adventures. The biggest surprise is that all the corpses are indeed tied together, though only the faithful will care just how.

A perplexing death in Quebec occupies Dr. Temperance Brennan in Reichs's fine 13th novel featuring the forensic anthropologist (after 206 Bones). The fingerprints of a man who died during autoerotic asphyxiation indicate that the deceased is John Charles Lowery of North Carolina, but Lowery supposedly died in Vietnam in 1968. Unsurprisingly, Lowery's father is reluctant to allow Brennan to reopen old family wounds, but she's determined to find out who's buried in Lowery's grave if Lowery died in Quebec. Brennan heads to Hawaii to seek the help of an old friend at the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC), whose mission is to find the remains of American war dead and bring them home. But instead of clarifying matters, Brennan's investigation only raises more questions, including parallel inquiries into a series of shark attacks and escalating island gang violence. Reichs, who once again uses her own scientific knowledge to enhance a complex plot and continually developing characters, delivers a whopper of a final twist. (Aug.)