Disturbing the Bones

Randall Jenkins is a Chicago cop. He is driven by hate and has little time for kindness or generosity. His life is coloured by the disappearance of his Civil Rights activist and journalist mother when he was young. Now, several decades on, an archaeologist who has been employed by the local big-wig to investigate a 1200-year-old site – one that unfortunately sits under an intended highway construction project of his - reveals some newer bones.  It seems it is not only the bones that she unearths, but big-league trouble.

Andrew Davis, the Chicago-born film director responsible for The Fugitive among others, and award-winning journalist Jeff Biggers, have written a thriller thick with plot lines that go back to less tolerant times in Cairo, a town with a Jim Crow history that is slowly dying on its feet. And they also come right up to date – and a bit beyond, as it is set in and around a global nuclear crisis when the President is a woman, and die-hards are still determined to preserve the USA from any disarmament agreements.   

The cast includes Dr Molly Moore, a star archaeologist, charged with investigating a centuries-old dig; retired general William Alexander, now a wealthy landowner and constructionist, whose personal roots lie deep within the soil of Alexander County, and whose intended highway runs across Molly’s dig; Chicago detective Randell Jenkins, whose job should keep him in Chicago, where a highly charged and controversial international think-tank of world leaders is taking place, but who cannot help being drawn back to his family home of Cairo when Molly’s  team unearth the bones of his missing mother; Jenkins’s cop partner, Nikki, who has to fill in the spaces and join the dots at home when he heads back to Cairo and leaves her in the lurch as violence spills over in Chicago; a new President who wants to dial down the arms race across the world;  Jenkins’s family, who remember when his mother was last in the town; and many more, linked to or shamed by the past and who are determined to save the future.

This is a scopey, mile-a-minute ride of a book, packed full of emotions, violence, history, plotting and tunnelling. Set aside at least a day to get stuck into it, and don’t come up for air until the end.