Kathy Reichs' first novel Déja Dead catapulted her to fame when it became a New York Times bestseller and won the 1997 Ellis Award for Best First Novel.  Her fourth novel featuring Temperance Brennan, Fatal Voyage, was published in 2001.

 

From teaching FBI agents at Quantico how to detect and recover human remains, to separating and identifying commingled body parts in her Montreal lab, as a forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs has brought her own dramatic work experience to her mesmerizing forensic thrillers.   She continues to work full time for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in North Carolina and for the Laboratoire de Sciences Judiciaires et de Medecine Legale for the province of Quebec.  She is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte.  She is one of only fifty forensic anthropologists certified by the American Board of Forensic Anthropology and is on the Board of Directors of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences.

 

Most recently she has traveled to Rwanda to testify at the UN Tribunal on Genocide. For her work with CILHI she has identified war dead from World War II and from all over Southeast Asia - she even examined the remains from the tomb of the Unknown Soldier.  How does she bear this kind of work? "You get used to it," she has said. "I don't like to see maggots. But you put on your mask and your surgical scrub and your latex gloves and you go at it."

 

Dr. Reichs is a native of Chicago, where she received her Ph.D. at Northwestern. She now divides her time between Charlotte, NC and Montreal, Quebec.