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Kathy Reichs Books in Order
Below is the complete list of Kathy Reichs books in order of publication. This is the recommended reading sequence for the series.
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Temperance Brennan Series
- Déjà Dead (1997)
Buy on Amazon - Death du Jour (1999)
Buy on Amazon - Deadly Decisions (2000)
Buy on Amazon - Fatal Voyage (2001)
Buy on Amazon - Grave Secrets (2002)
Buy on Amazon - Bare Bones (2003)
Buy on Amazon - Monday Mourning (2004)
Buy on Amazon - Cross Bones (2005)
Buy on Amazon - Break No Bones (2006)
Buy on Amazon - Bones to Ashes (2007)
Buy on Amazon - Devil Bones (2008)
Buy on Amazon - 206 Bones (2009)
Buy on Amazon - Spider Bones / Mortal Remains (2010)
Buy on Amazon - Flash and Bones (2011)
Buy on Amazon - Bones Are Forever (2012)
Buy on Amazon - Bones in Her Pocket (2013)
Buy on Amazon - Bones ofthe Lost (2013)
Buy on Amazon - Swamp Bones (2014)
Buy on Amazon - Bones Never Lie (2014)
Buy on Amazon - Bones on Ice (2015)
Buy on Amazon - Speaking in Bones (2015)
Buy on Amazon - A Conspiracy of Bones (2018)
Buy on Amazon - The Bone Code (2021)
Buy on Amazon - Cold, Cold Bones (2022)
Buy on Amazon - The Bone Hacker (2023)
Buy on Amazon - Fire and Bones (2024)
Buy on Amazon - Evil Bones (2025)
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Temperance Brennan Collections Series
- The Bone Collection (2016)
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Temperance Brennan Short Stories/Novellas Series
- First Bones (2016)
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Bones Series
with Max Allan Collins
- Buried Deep (2006)
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- Shock (2009)
Buy on Amazon - Virals (2010)
Buy on Amazon - Seizure (2011)
Buy on Amazon - Shift (2013)
Buy on Amazon - Code (2013)
Buy on Amazon - Swipe (2013)
Buy on Amazon - Exposure (2014)
Buy on Amazon - Terminal (2015)
Buy on Amazon - Spike (2016)
Buy on Amazon - Trace Evidence (2016)
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Standalone Novels Series
- Two Nights (2017)
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Non-Fiction Series
- Inside The Forensic Files of Dr Kathy Reichs (2003)
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The MatchUp Collection Series
- Honor & … (2017)
(By C.J. Box, Sandra Brown)
Buy on Amazon - Deserves to Be Dead (2017)
(By John Sandford, Lisa Jackson)
Buy on Amazon - Getaway (2017)
(By Lisa Scottoline, Nelson DeMille)
Buy on Amazon - Midnight Flame (2018)
(By Christopher Rice, Lara Adrian)
Buy on Amazon - Short Story (2019)
(By Karin Slaughter, Michael Koryta)
Buy on Amazon - Past Prologue (2019)
(By Diana Gabaldon, Steve Berry)
Buy on Amazon - Faking a Murderer (2019)
(With Lee Child)
Buy on Amazon - Dig Here (2019)
(By Charlaine Harris, Andrew Gross)
Buy on Amazon - Taking the Veil (2019)
(By J.A. Jance, Eric Van Lustbader)
Buy on Amazon - Rambo on Their Minds (2019)
(By Gayle Lynds, David Morrell)
Buy on Amazon - Footloose (2019)
(By Val McDermid, Peter James)
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About Kathy Reichs
Kathy Reichs occupies a rare position in crime fiction because her reputation rests on more than imaginative authority. She is not simply a writer who chose forensic detail as a genre flavor. She is a trained forensic anthropologist whose professional life directly shaped the fiction that made her famous. That background is the key to understanding both her career and her bibliography. When Reichs writes about bones, trauma, identification, and the long afterlife of violent death in an investigation, she is not borrowing the atmosphere from elsewhere. She helped define it.
Born in Chicago, Reichs trained in anthropology and eventually built a professional career that included academic work and forensic casework in both the United States and Canada. That dual life became central to her public identity once the Temperance Brennan novels took off. The most useful way to understand her fiction is not as a simple translation of real cases into thriller form, but as a blend of scientific knowledge and commercial storytelling. She brought a specialist’s understanding of human remains into a genre that had often treated forensics more loosely, and she did it without abandoning pace, suspense, or recurring-character appeal.
Her defining creation is Temperance Brennan, the forensic anthropologist at the center of the long-running mystery series that began with Déjà Dead. Brennan is the obvious anchor of Reichs’s bibliography, but the character matters for more than series recognition. Through Tempe, Reichs found a way to organize highly technical material into emotionally accessible crime fiction. The books are procedural in one sense, but they are also very much about interpretation: reading the dead, reconstructing erased stories, and confronting how violence leaves traces long after ordinary witnesses have gone silent. Reichs’s fiction often begins where many detective novels would otherwise end, with damaged remains and an incomplete human history that must be rebuilt.
That gives her work a distinctive tone. The Temperance Brennan novels are darker and more physically grounded than many puzzle-driven mysteries, yet they are not bleak for the sake of it. Reichs writes with a scientist’s attention to evidence and a thriller writer’s instinct for momentum. Her settings, especially Montreal, North Carolina, and other recurring professional environments, matter because they create a lived-in investigative world rather than a generic crime backdrop. Over time, the series became one of the major modern forensic mystery lines, not just because of the science, but because Reichs knew how to make scientific process feel urgent.
Her bibliography is best understood in two major branches. The first is the Temperance Brennan series, which forms the center of her career and the reason most readers seek out her books in order. The second is her work for younger readers, especially the Virals books co-written with her son Brendan Reichs. That series shows another side of her writing life: more adventurous, more overtly high-concept, and aimed at a different audience, but still shaped by her long-standing interest in investigation, evidence, and young protagonists trying to make sense of danger. The existence of both branches matters because it shows Reichs is not only a one-series author, even though one series very clearly defines her legacy.
Her career also has a wider cultural footprint because the Temperance Brennan novels helped inspire Bones. The television version is not a direct one-to-one adaptation of the books, and readers are often surprised by how different the literary Tempe Brennan feels from her screen counterpart. Still, the connection says something important about Reichs’s influence. She helped turn forensic anthropology into one of the most recognizable forms of modern crime storytelling.
What makes Kathy Reichs enduring is the combination of expertise and control. Plenty of crime writers research technical subjects well. Far fewer reshape a subgenre by writing from inside the discipline itself. Her bibliography holds together because the same promise runs through it again and again: the dead are still speaking, the evidence is still there, and truth can still be recovered if someone patient and skilled enough knows how to listen.
Series: Kathy Reichs