Northern Maine fingerprint analyst Shaw Connolly is back in Restless Bones, the excellent follow-up to Gillian French’s adult debut, Shaw Connolly Lives to Tell. Fans may enjoy this novel even more than the first—it’s like catching up with an old friend who lives a hectically unsettled, yet completely absorbing life.
Thanks to Shaw’s die-hard efforts in the first book, her nemesis, Anders Johnson, is now behind bars, incarcerated for killing Shaw’s teenage sister, Thea, years ago. But he continues to haunt her, asking for her presence as detectives try to locate the bodies of other girls he claims to have killed. Meanwhile, Shaw is investigating the case of a missing young woman found in her car after being submerged in a lake for months. Then there’s the 84-year-old whose body was found wrapped in a comforter in the woods behind her home. These three storylines propel this book from start to finish, making readers feel part of each investigation as Shaw uses and explains fingerprint analysis in intriguing ways.
Shaw remains fiercely impulsive in both her personal and professional life, and although she and her estranged husband seem to be reconciling, she has the hots for a colleague, Detective Padraig McKenzie. Adding to her emotional angst, Shaw’s son is being miserably bullied at middle school.
French excels in weaving all of these situations together in believable, compelling ways. Shaw is a feisty, self-aware character whose failings make her all the more interesting. Her younger sister admonishes her about her continued involvement with Thea’s killer: “I think you’re hooked on the chase. You can’t give it up. You talk about us finding peace, but I think you’ve been looking so long that you don’t know how to stop. It’s like you’re addicted to the ugliness, and when the cops gave you the chance to get back into it, you jumped.” French brings a surprising resolution to this dynamic and adds a new dimension to it that Shaw will have to deal with in future books.
As with her first book, French combines painstaking forensic analysis and detective work with edge-of-your-seat action scenes, often utilizing the rugged geography of northern Maine. Restless Bones is a rewarding return.