36.13: Joyland, by Stephen King (2013 paperback)

I'm a huge King fan, so I enjoyed this crime thriller. Harkening back to pulp crime fiction, the novel is set in the 1980s and combines a love story and a cold-case crime, overlaid with just enough of the supernatural to maintain the King flavor.  

17 and 18: Déjà Dead and Death Du Jour, by Kathy Reichs (1999 and 2000 Kindle)

 Bones is one of my favorite television shows, so I've been both resistant to and curious about reading the books upon which the series is based: resistant because it's always a challenge to see the show/movie of a book you like (or vise versa in this case) and curious because I'm a fan of the science and characters in the show.

Let me introduce you to a character in the books:

• A woman in her 40s
• Divorced, with a college-aged daughter
• Recovered alcoholic who has been dry for 10 years
• Teaches at a college in North Carolina, US
• Works part-time at a small, crowded morgue in Montreal, Canada
• Likes cats, take-out food, and news shows

If you're a fan of the show, you're likely thinking that this is a character that just didn't make it from the books to the TV show.  And you're right, of course.  Oddly enough, though, her name is Temperance Brennan.  She's a forensic anthropologist specializing in bones.  Bones.

The first two books in the series and the crime cases they unravel are interesting, although they lack many of the characteristics and characters of the show.  There is no science institute. Or Booth. Or Cam. Or Hodgins and Angela. Or Sweets. Or high-tech equipment. Or Washington DC. And there's a lot less science.

Some of these features and people may be coming in later shows, of course, but I sort of doubt it and the books are actually fine without them.  They're nothing like the show, and in some ways this is a good thing; there is so little similarity that by the end of the second book I stopped thinking of them as the same.  It even became surprising when someone would refer to the lead character as Temperance Brennan. Ultimately, it means I don't have to be disappointed by either the TV show or the books.

What I find really interesting is the fact that Reichs has been involved in the development of the TV series.  It makes me wonder.  Is this how she sees herself?  What she wishes her life to be? (The books, and thus the series, are billed as being based on her actual life/career.) Or, is she simply meeting societal expectations?  A younger, more attractive, highly intelligent, sexually open, emotionally disconnected woman somehow fits the bill--where an otherwise average woman of high intelligence doesn't.  Which is interesting in itself.