Temperance Brennan is a forensic anthropologist with one of the longest commutes in fiction--from North Carolina to Montreal. She works in both places, and in this third outing (after Déjà Dead and Death du Jour) she manages to make a riveting (if a bit too coincidental) connection between a skull in Montreal and the partial skeleton of a teenager--dead since 1984--in North Carolina. Linking them is a 9-year-old girl shot on a Montreal street, the victim of a war among members of an outlaw motorcycle gang in eastern Canada. Another piece of the puzzle is provided by Tempe's visiting nephew, who is fascinated by the biker culture and is drawn into the mystery Tempe's trying to solve.