REVIEW for Spider Bones

Thank you to the wonderful people at Simon & Schuster for sending me a copy of this book!

TITLE:                         Spider Bones

AUTHOR:                   Kathy Reichs

GENRE:                      Thriller

RATING:                     2 Stars

It has occured to me that Kathy Reich's books would have lots of potential to be 4 stars if only she would get off a few kicks - starting with describing, in minute and painful detail everything you can possibly want to know (and don't care about) on very specific subject matters. IN this book, it is Vietnam and a huge, huge amount of geographical information about Hawaii - not to mention info on the army and their procedures. Frankly, the entire thing was one huge bore and I found myself skipping entire pages just to get to the "main storyline".
The other thing that was wrong with this book is that I got completely confused by all the dead people who may or may not be dead or then again may be. The amount of names being thrown around - was astounding, especially when you factor in that one person may have been "posing" as the other one.

Finally, thanks to all of the above, the actual "thriller" and "suspense" part of the book was seriously toned down - leaving us with a huge number of pages of blah, blah - intermingled with one tiny little piece of the puzzle - it was extremely slow going and at times, quite mind numbing.

Having said all that, Reichs has been known to write a fairly exciting whodunnit - and I could see some tiny bits of it in this book - but it is, for the most part, completely hidden in all the other stuff and frankly, I don' have the energy to dig through it all.

I also found myself wanting to pretty well smack both Tempe's and Ryan's daughters at some point in the storyline - both being completely annoying, not to mention ungrateful young adults who somehow ended up in beautiful Hawaii but choose to complain throughout the entire novel. Which, of course, just added to the long drawn out affair that is this book.

Really, the only thing I liked about this one was the humor surrounding Tempe's cat and bird - which, unfortunately, only occured at the beginning of the book.