"I held the last of the dead man's bones in my left hand. It was his skull, which I cradled upside down in my palm, as comfortably and naturally as an NBA player might hold a basketball. As I searched for a place to hide it, I felt the tip of my index finger absentmindedly tracing the edges of a hole in the right temple. It was a square-cornered opening, about the size of a small postage stamp, and it had been punched by a murder weapon - a weapon I'd tucked into a angle of honeysuckle vines a few moments before." (ch. 1)
The first few sentences from the crime novel, The Bone Yard
by Jefferson Bass; Hardcover, 336 pages. Published by William Morrow, March 8, 2011. Genre: thriller. Source: Publisher.Product description: The onset of summer brings steamy weather to East Tennessee and the Body Farm, Dr. Bill Brockton's human-decomposition research facility at the University of Tennessee. But Brockton's about to get more heat than he's bargained for Angie St. Clair, a forensic analyst with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, asks him to help prove that her sister's death was suicide, but murder.
Brockton's quick consulting trip takes a long, harrowing detour when bones begin turning up amid the pines and live oaks of the Florida panhandle. Two adolescent skulls - ravaged by time and animals, but bearing the telltale signs of lethal fractures - send Brockton, Angie, and special Agent Stu Vickery on a search for the long-lost victims. The quest leads them to the ruins of the North Florida Boys' Reformatory, a notorious juvenile detention facility that met a fiery end more than forty years ago.
About the authors: Jefferson Bass is the writing team of forensic anthropologist Dr. Bill Bass and journalist writer and documentary filmmaker, Jon Jefferson. Visit them at http://www.jeffersonbass.com/
