A Serial Success: How Forensic Anthropologist Kathy Reichs Became a Bestselling Author

When Kathy Reichs (MA ’72, PhD ’75) decided in 1994 to follow the adage “Write what you know,” little did she imagine what lay in store for her.

It didn’t hurt that what she knew was the inherently tense, dramatic and grisly world of forensic anthropology, in which she identified bodies for medical coroners and determined how they died. It also helped that she brought the same steely determination she had applied to her scientific career to the craft of writing. But no one could have foreseen the success that awaited her.

Reichs had decided to write a forensic crime novel based on a case she had worked on in her job at the Laboratoire des Sciences Judiciaires et de Médecine Légale in Montreal that involved a serial murderer who dismembered at least one of his female victims. Reichs had just been named full professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Charlotte, and was dividing her time between Montreal and Charlotte. Her friend Bill Maples, author of the nonfiction book Dead Men Do Tell Tales, had encouraged her to give writing a try, and people who knew about her profession told her all the time that she should write a book.

“At that point I was feeling more free to do what I wanted,” she reflects. “Writing it wasn’t easy, but it was fun.”

When Reichs finished her manuscript, she made a deal with herself to accept 50 rejections before she gave up trying to get it published. She sent it off to exactly one publishing house (Scribner), which immediately accepted it.

Titled Déjà Dead, the book came out in 1997 and spent several months on the New York Times bestseller list. It won Canada’s Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Novel and was eventually translated into more than 30 languages. Reichs followed her wildly successful debut with another novel, Death du Jour, in 1999, and then another, Deadly Decisions, in 2000. In fact, she has published a forensic crime novel—or “science-driven mystery,” as the genre is known—every year since. Her tenth book, Bones to Ashes, is due out this summer.

Reichs’s books have spawned a new generation of forensic crime fiction, but what sets her apart is her focus on meticulously detailed, real-life science. She writes while furnishing consulting services to two agencies, the office of North Carolina’s chief medical examiner and the examiner for the province of Quebec in Montreal. (She has been on leave from UNC since 1998.)

In 2004 her books made the big leap from print to screen in the Fox television series Bones, which regularly attracts between nine and ten million viewers and is considered a cult hit. Like the books, Bones features Temperance Brennan, Tempe for short, a smart-mouthed, intrepid forensic anthropologist who comes across a plethora of gruesome cases. (The TV series doesn’t mirror the books, although it covers similar territory.) Reichs optioned Tempe’s character to Fox and now works as a producer on the series to make sure the science remains accurate.

Reichs has found the process of getting her work on television a bit nerve-wracking. “We’re hoping for a third season, but you never know,” she says. “The tough thing is getting picked up initially—you’re wondering, ‘Will they make the pilot? Will the show get picked up for season one?’ You can never relax. But it looks like we’re clipping right along.

“I like moving back and forth between the TV world and the crime world,” she continues. “I like the diversity. I like to interact with different kinds of people and having them feed back into the other. Apparently I’ve never been satisfied with one career—I’m your classic multi-tasker.”

Multi-tasking is a skill that Reichs has honed to a fine art. She grew up in the Beverly neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, then later Minnesota and Glen Ellyn, a western suburb of Chicago. Before she finished her undergraduate degree in anthropology at American University in 1971 she was married and raising her first child. As soon as she graduated she came to Northwestern, where she earned a master’s degree and a doctorate in physical anthropology. She found a mentor in bio-archaeologist Jane Buikstra, with whom she still keeps in touch, and also studied with Stuart Struever and James Brown. She promptly got a job teaching at UNC and began helping the local police identify bodies, even though her specialty was old bones. She went on to become one of only 75 people certified by the American Board of Forensic Anthropology.

Along the way she had two more children, and learned to juggle a career and child rearing at a time when family-friendly work policies were virtually unheard of. “Nobody made concessions. You had to be apologetic about having kids—it was a different atmosphere. You had to double-prove you could do the job.”

Now that her children are grown, Reichs has more time to contribute to major forensic projects all over the world. She appeared in Rwanda after the 1994 genocide to testify at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal, and assisted in exhuming the area of Lake Atitlan in the highlands of southwest Guatemala, which contained mass graves that resulted from the country’s 30-year civil war. She also served as a member of the mortuary response team that helped uncover remains at the World Trade Center disaster and as a consultant to the Joint MIA/POW Accounting Command, the U.S. military lab in Hawaii that identifies the country’s war dead. She’s currently serving as vice president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences.

Reichs says that her profession requires coping mechanisms and a level of emotional separation in order to keep her equilibrium and be effective. But there are some cases that inevitably haunt her. “Kids are always the hardest. And Ground Zero was tough both physically and psychologically, although I felt lucky to be there. Everybody in the country wanted to do something, and we were able to get out and really help.”

Many of her real-life work experiences wind up in her novels. Reichs expertly guides readers through each step of her autopsies, giving fascinating information along the way. She reconstructs what actually happened to each victim from bones and other physical fragments, and shows how forensic anthropologists help give investigators clues about perpetrators.

“Details like a unique stab pattern can help me give suggestions as to who the perpetrator might be. The bones also tell me an identity, if the victim was an older white female or a young black male,” Reichs explains.

She doesn’t spare her readers the macabre details of her profession, one being maggots, which she admits continue to disgust her. In Déjà Dead, Tempe examines in a lab a victim she found decomposing in a plastic bag in a ravine and describes “a seething blanket of pale yellow that made a languid, wave-like retreat from the surface of each limb as [she] withdrew it from the body bag. Maggots will abandon a corpse when exposed to light.”

In addition to uncovering the mysteries contained in human remains, Reichs has also helped unearth the public’s latent interest in—some might call it an obsession with—forensic science. Countless TV shows such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and other forensic books by a number of different authors have popped up since the 1990s. Reichs attributes this wave of curiosity to the O.J. Simpson trial in 1995, which exposed a national audience to the language of forensic science, including DNA testing and blood-spatter patterns, day in and day out. “In the 1970s and 80s we had [the popular TV show] ‘Quincy,’ but that was about it.”

Now that she has achieved such success, has the writing part gotten easier?

“In some ways it gets easier, in some ways harder. It’s easier in that I know the process now, and I have support. I have editors I’m comfortable working with. But it’s hard because I have to reintroduce the same material for new readers. I have to do it differently in each book. How do I say the same thing, without boring returning readers?”

Reichs will surely find a way, as she’s under contract for four more Tempe Brennan novels.