“Yes, Detective.” My grin widened. “You are still my favorite Charlotte badass.”
FROM THE FORENSIC FILES OF DR. KATHY REICHS
In this bonus Q & A, the scribe behind Tempe Brennan takes questions on NASCAR, extremist groups, Tempe’s love life, and the difference between writing a novel and penning a script for the TV show Bones on FOX.
1. Flash and Bones begins with the discovery of a body in a barrel of asphalt in a dump next to the Charlotte Motor Speedway, and characters from the racing world become implicated in the drama. What drew you to NASCAR as a backdrop? Are you yourself a racing fan?
Prior to writing Flash and Bones, I had only passing knowledge of auto racing, having attended one event way back in the gray dawn of history. But almost every Charlottean knows a player in the game—be it a team owner, a mechanic, a sponsor, or a driver. It’s hard not to get caught up in the excitement each May and October when hundreds of thousands converge on our burg for big races. Like Daytona or Darlington, Charlotte is an epicenter for the sport. And, as Tempe explains in the book, stock car racing originated with bootlegging in the Carolina mountains during Prohibition.
I ended up writing NASCAR into the novel because of my longtime friend Barry Byrd, himself a huge racing enthusiast. Each time I began a new Temperance Brennan novel Barry would suggest that NASCAR would provide a rich background for a story. I finally realized he was right. Barry offered to introduce me to Jimmy Johnson and his team, to take me to the track, to include me with the gang attending the All-Star Race and the Coca-Cola 600.
Barry followed through on his promises. I met track owners and managers, sports journalists, pit crew chiefs, and fans who had driven their Winnebagos from Portland, Houston, Teaneck, and Nashville. Thanks to Barry and the Smith family I enjoyed a top to bottom tour of the Charlotte Motor Speedway. My fascination with the adjacent landfill was, I fear, a source of some dismay.
2. Flash and Bones takes place entirely in Tempe Brennan’s hometown of Charlotte. Spider Bones, on the other hand, begins in Montreal, where Tempe occasionally works, then moves to Hawaii. Other books have taken Tempe to Chicago, Israel, and Guatemala. How do you decide where to set your next novel? In what city do you spend most of your own time these days?
Setting is a living, breathing part of each story I write. When Tempe travels, her destination is always a place that I know well, one in which I have plied my trade or spent time doing research.
I work and live in Charlotte, so Tempe does, too. Like her, I am a commuter, shifting regularly from North Carolina to Quebec, where I consult to the Laboratoire de sciences judiciaires et de medecine legale in Montreal. Yep. I have the mother lode of frequent flier miles.
In Spider Bones Tempe heads to Hawaii to pursue a case for JPAC, the Joint Prisoners of War, Missing in Action Accounting Command, the U.S. military facility dedicated to identifying the remains of servicemen and -women who have died far from home. Easy choice. I consulted for this lab for many years.
In Grave Secrets Tempe exhumes a mass grave in Guatemala. In the year 2000 I was invited to do the same by the Guatemalan Foundation for Forensic Anthropology.
In Bones to Ashes a case takes Tempe to Tracadie, New Brunswick. This setting was suggested by an exhumation and analysis I performed for an Arcadian family living in that province.
In 206 Bones Tempe flies to Chicago. Another no-brainer. That’s where I was born.
You get the idea. It’s better to observe firsthand than to make things up.
3. Another dominant theme of Flash and Bones is right-wing extremism, a subject about which you’ve written before. Members of a white supremacist group figure as suspects in the book. How did you become interested in these factions of American society?
Extremist ideas do not offend me. In my view, people are free to believe what they will. Extremism that hurts others offends me greatly.
In Cross Bones I wrote of religious extremism—belief systems that refuse to accept the legitimacy of differing worldviews. In that story events take Tempe to Israel and bring her into contact with fringe groups who use violence to impose their ideologies and customs on others.
Political extremism can be equally dangerous, whether coming from the left or the right. In recent years hatred and intolerance have led to deadly attacks by domestic terrorists in the United States. Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber; Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, the Oklahoma City bombers; Eric Rudolph, the Olympic Park Bomber. Such individuals choose to kill their fellow citizens based on their own warped definitions of morality.
After years on the run, Rudolph was arrested while digging through a Dumpster in western North Carolina, about a four-hour drive from Charlotte. I wondered who else might be hiding in the woods and back roads of my state. In Flash and Bones, I imagine a group of people who come from the extreme mold of Eric Rudolph and his narrow-minded brethren.
Preferring comfort in numbers, some right-wing fanatics form clubs or militias. That’s the case in Flash and Bones. Tempe is drawn into the world of an extremist group and must learn their philosophy and decipher their code of conduct in order to determine their role in a cold case that disturbs her greatly.
4. Over the course of Flash and Bones, Tempe develops a flirtatious relationship with Cotton Galimore, the head of security at the Charlotte Motor Speedway. Her old flame Lieutenant-detective Andrew Ryan and sometime suitor and Charlotte attorney Charlie Hunt only make minor appearances in the story. How do you decide what Tempe’s romantic life is going to be like in each novel? Can you give readers any hints about where it might go in the future? It’s true. Tempe’s love life is in a bit of a muddle. Andrew Ryan is preoccupied with his daughter, Lily, who is in drug rehab. And miles away. Charlie Hunt is absorbed in a complex legal case. Miles away in another sense.
Enter Cotton Galimore, strong, intelligent, and smoking hot. Sadly, Galimore’s past isn’t exactly spick-and- span. Joe Hawkins distrusts him. Skinny Slidell loathes him. And the guy is cocky as hell.
But the heart wants what the heart wants. Inexplicably, Tempe is drawn to the disgraced ex-cop. Is Galimore
