"The Devil's Bones"

Jefferson Bass is the writing team of Dr. Bill Bass and Jon Jefferson. Dr. Bass, a world-renowned forensic anthropologist, founded the University of Tennessee's Anthropology Research Facility -- the Body Farm -- a quarter-century ago. Jon Jefferson is a veteran journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker.

They applied the Page 69 Test to the latest Body Farm novel, The Devil's Bones, and reported the following:

“A five-hundred-pound body’s gong to have two or three hundred pounds of fat on it,” Dr. Bill Brockton says, on page 69 of The Devil's Bones. “That’s gonna make one heck of a grease fire once it melts and ignites.” Brockton, a cheery and unflappable forensic anthropologist who’s modeled on a real-life forensic legend, pulls no punches…and neither does this, the third in the Body Farm series from Jefferson Bass, the writing duo of Dr. Bill Bass (the anthropologist who founded the Body Farm) and Jon Jefferson (a veteran journalist and documentary filmmaker). In The Devil's Bones, Brockton — Bill Bass’s fictional alter ego — investigates a series of fire-related cases, including a non-cremating crematorium, a set of incinerated bones from a burned car, and blasted remains that might — or might not — belong to the scientist’s nemesis, Garland Hamilton, a deranged medical examiner who had murdered Brockton’s lover. Although page 69 of The Devil's Bones is more dialogue-intensive than most in the book, it does embody (pardon the pun) the combination of gritty forensic detail and tongue-in-cheek humor that are a hallmark of Jefferson Bass’s Body Farm novels.

For more about the authors and their work, including video footage of the real-life Body Farm, visit JeffersonBass.com.

Visit the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue