David Boreanaz

Being involved in the aftermath of genocides and terrorist outrages lends bestselling crime writer Kathy Reichs’s novels a chilling authenticity

With her ironed blonde hair and red nails, Kathy Reichs looks every inch the Park Avenue lady, yet she’s far more interesting than that. When she’s not writing the bestselling crime novels which inspired the hit TV series, Bones - starring Angel pin-up David Boreanaz and the magnetic Emily Deschenal, who plays the heroine, Temperance Brennan - she works as a forensic anthropologist and is a frequent expert witness in criminal trials.

In addition to testifying at the United Nations tribunal on the Rwandan genocide and helping to identify people buried in mass graves in Guatemala, she has carried out forensic work at Ground Zero in New York.

Her first novel, Deja Dead, was the most successful crime debut ever and won the 1997 Ellis Award for best first novel. Her eighth novel, Cross Bones, has been in translated into 30 languages. She’s snapping at the heels of Patricia Cornwell for the title of queen of crime and readers can count on her for the unsentimental science.

’Patsy Cornwell is a writer, not a scientist,’ she says firmly. ’Because I write about what I do, rather than researching the field, it gives my books greater authenticity. Many fiction writers who put the science in don’t get it right.’

The media are full of the deadly rivalry between Reichs and Cornwell. Is it that cliche of pitting two top girls against each other? ’Yes, I do think so; from my perspective there’s absolutely no animosity. I’d love to meet her and I’m surprised we haven’t met before.’

As a forensic anthropologist, Reichs works with the decomposed, burned and dismembered. ’My job isn’t glamorous; that’s the one misconception.’ Her novels give details of procedures, from carbon dating to tooth enamel studies of murder victims. This is genre lit but with a strong educational remit.

For all the grisly imagery, Reichs remembers the life behind the bones. If you died in suspicious circumstances, you’d want her as your last witness. This scientific work is lonely. As her heroine Temperance observes: ’Violent death is the final intrusion and those who investigate it are the ultimate voyeurs.’

Reichs takes risks with her fiction; she pushes the reader to examine ’the broader issues of society’. Grave Secrets tackles Guatemala’s ’disappeared’, Bare Bones the trafficking of endangered species. ’I don’t want to repeat serial killer after serial killer,’ she says. Inequality is a key issue. ’I do it more from a socioeconomic than a racial perspective, because it’s different wherever you are. Maybe in the US, it’s the blacks who tend to be more highly represented in the lower socioeconomic groups, but somewhere else it could be street kids, hookers or down and outs who are marginalised.’

Her last novel, Cross Bones, covers similar territory to The Da Vinci Code. Temperance is called to Israel to perform an autopsy on a skeleton which could be that of Jesus Christ, a plot inspired by the real discovery of a skeleton during excavations of the sacred Jewish Masada site in the Sixties. ’I thought my book would offend not only fundamentalist Christians but fundamentalist Jews and fundamentalist Muslims, but apart from a couple of angry emails ... nothing,’ she says, puzzled. ’No one is going to shoot me, I guess.’

And now 20th Century-Fox has created a television series based on Reichs’s life or, rather, that of Temperance. It’s already Sky’s highest-rated new show after 24. For Reichs, a producer on the series, this is a triumph in a world newly in love with creationism. ’That’s the great thing about TV shows like CSI and Bones, it’s about getting kids interested in science. They now can see a point to sitting through biology and chemistry.’

Like her creator, Temperance is a brilliant scientist who has no patience with touchy-feely self-analysis. She doesn’t understand popular culture and refuses to play by the rules of dating. In many ways, Bones makes being a geek cool. I tell Reichs what a great role model I think Temperance is for young women.

’There’s no artifice to her,’ she says admiringly. ’She’s open and says things that perhaps are inappropriate. In fact, she’s different [on TV] from the Temperance in my books; I think of it as an earlier phase in her life. This is Temperance as a thirtysomething rather than fortysomething. She’s less sophisticated, less polished.’

Even Reichs’s fans agree she can’t write sex scenes. There’s something too self-consciously hard boiled about her prose. But the TV series gets it just right, with a delicious soft-burn relationship between Temperance and FBI agent Seeley Booth (Boreanaz). If anything, Booth is more intuitive, more ’feminine’, while Temperance is the Alpha male. ’She insists on logic, which is almost a role-reversal,’ enthuses the author.

Unlike her single heroine, Reichs is married with three grown-up children (the original impetus to write was to put them through college), but she feels an affinity with the outsider. ’The fact that Temperance has problems and flaws makes her so much more appealing than some smooth superhero like James Bond. One of things I wanted in my books - and the series - is a sense of humour. Just because she’s not married doesn’t mean she’s dysfunctional.’

Reichs is charming, but cool; you sense she has little time for small talk. ’I work with the dead, but I am working for the living,’ she says simply. But she’s not a puritan. Her weaknesses include fast cars, a suite at Claridge’s when she is in London and expensive bath products to take away the sights and smells of the day’s autopsy. Whenever possible, she catches up with her close friends Maeve Binchy and Ian Rankin for a riotous night out: ’Ian and Maeve are my two of my favourite people on the planet.’

Science has enthralled Reichs since her childhood in Chicago. She started as an academic bioarchaeologist, inspecting ancient bones, but forensic work kept landing on her desk (her first case was a leg in a lake, preserved since the Fifties by its nylon stocking). She says it’s the human, moral angle that she finds so satisfying. The dedication in one of her books reads: ’I have touched their bones. I mourn for them.’

Today, Reichs divides her time between Montreal, where she is the forensic anthropologist at Quebec’s medical-legal laboratory, and Charlotte, North Carolina, where she works with the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. She is also called on by the UN for human rights work, for which she receives witness protection because fellow anthropologists have been victims of revenge murders. She plays down the bravery. ’Witness protection is a bit of a joke. They have you guarded by these 14-year-olds with big guns, and they put you in these vans with dark windows. Then you look behind you and the whole back is open. I’ve become someone who’s used to a car waiting to meet them at an airport when they arrive,’ she acknowledges wryly.

In Tanzania, where the Rwanda tribunal sat, she testified in a case involving 27 graves found in and around a garage in Kigali, the capital. ’It’s important to get concrete evidence on the record so that years down the road someone can’t say, "This didn’t take place." There’s a huge danger in human rights cases of accusing anyone, so that someone takes the blame for an atrocity. Our work has to be done to the same standard as a forensic criminal investigation here, which is hard, given the circumstances.’

She says there are times when the work gets to her: after 9/11, she volunteered to work with the teams sorting through the debris. ’It was the normalcy of it that was so painful. We’d be lifting heavy stuff, then you’d pull out a photograph. I found a box of wedding invitations that someone was in the middle of addressing. We were all assigned psychologists and I am better now, but it was hard.’

Was she ever tempted to write trashy airport fiction to escape the pressures of her day job? ’Oh no. Murder mysteries are puzzles that are fun to resolve. Death is what I know about, so it never occurred to me to write anything else.’

· ’Bones’ is on Sky One on Thursdays at 10pm. Kathy Reichs’s new novel, ’Break No Bones’, will be published by Heinemann on 6 July