To some, the dead are a commodity. For Tempe Brennan, they hold the key to cracking a horrific crime ring.

Among the ancient remains in a Native American burial ground, Tempe discovers a fresh skeleton -- and what began as an ordinary teaching stint at an archeology field school in Charleston, South Carolina, fast becomes a heated investigation into an alarming pattern of homicides. The clues hidden in the bones lead to a street clinic where a monstrous discovery awaits, and Tempe -- whose personal life is in upheaval, with two men competing for her -- can''t afford any distractions as she pieces together a shattering and terrifying puzzle.

Kathleen Joan "Kathy" Reich is native of Chicago and works as a forensic anthropologists for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, State of North Carolina and for the Laboratoire des Sciences Judiciaires et de Médecine Légale in Quebec. She has taught at Northern Illinois University, University of Pittsburgh, Concordia University, McGill University and is currently the Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her work as a forensic anthropologists is internationally recognized since she has traveled to Rwanda to testify at the UN Tribunal on Genocide, helped in an exhumation in the area of the highlands of southwest Guatemala, done forensic work at Ground Zero in New York, and so forth. To date, she has written nine novels, which have been translated into 30 languages. Her first novel, Déjà Dead, won the 1997 Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Novel.