A collection of pulse-pounding tales featuring forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan—including the untold story of her first case! The #1 New York Times bestselling author behind the hit Fox series Bones, Kathy Reichs is renowned for chilling suspense and fascinating forensic detail. The Bone Collection presents her trademark artistry in this collection of thrilling short fiction.   In First Bones, a prequel to Reichs’s first novel, Déjà Dead , she at last reveals the tale of how Tempe became a forensic anthropologist. In this never-before-published story, Tempe recalls the case that lured her from a promising career in academia into the grim but addictive world of criminal investigation. (It all began with a visit from a pair of detectives—and a John Doe recovered from an arson scene in a trailer.) The collection is rounded out with three more stories that take Tempe from the low country of the Florida Everglades, where she makes a grisly discovery in the stomach of an eighteen-foot Burmese python, to the heights of Mount Everest, where a frozen corpse is unearthed. No matter where she goes, Tempe’s cases make for the most gripping reading.   Praise for Kathy Reichs and the Temperance Brennan series   “Nobody does forensics thrillers like Kathy Reichs. She’s the real deal.” —David Baldacci   “Kathy Reichs writes smart—no, make that brilliant—mysteries that are as realistic as nonfiction and as fast-paced as the best thrillers about Jack Reacher or Alex Cross.” —James Patterson   “Every minute in the morgue with Tempe is golden.” — The New York Times Book Review Praise for Kathy Reichs and the Temperance Brennan series   “Nobody does forensics thrillers like Kathy Reichs. She’s the real deal.” —David Baldacci   “Kathy Reichs writes smart—no, make that brilliant—mysteries that are as realistic as nonfiction and as fast-paced as the best thrillers about Jack Reacher or Alex Cross.” —James Patterson   “Every minute in the morgue with Tempe is golden.” — The New York Times Book Review Kathy Reichs is the author of nineteen New York Times bestselling novels and the co-author, with her son, Brendan Reichs, of six novels for young adults. Like the protagonist of her Temperance Brennan series, Reichs is a forensic anthropologist—one of fewer than one hundred ever certified by the American Board of Forensic Anthropology. A professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, she is a former vice president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. Reichs’s own life, as much as her novels, is the basis for the TV show Bones, one of the longest-running series in the history of the Fox network. Chapter 1 I sat with my chair drawn close to him, an icy heat hovering below my sternum. Fear. Through the sliding glass door came muted hospital sounds. An arriving elevator. A rattling gurney or cart. A paged code or name. In the room, only the soft rhythmic pinging of sensors monitoring vital signs. His face looked gaunt and greenish gray in the glow of machines tracking his pulse and respirations. Every now and then I glanced at a screen. Watching the lines jump their erratic zigzag patterns. Willing the pinging and jumping to continue. Surgical Trauma Intensive Care Unit. So cold. So sterile. Yet a human touch: a stain shaped like Mickey’s ears on one rail of the overcomplicated bed. Funny what you notice when under stress. A sheet covered him from the neck down, leaving only his arms exposed. A pronged tube delivered oxygen to his nostrils. A needle infused liquids into a vein in his right wrist. The arm with the IV lay tucked to his torso. The other rested on his chest, elbow flexed at an obtuse angle. I watched his sheet-­clad chest rise and fall. Somehow his body looked smaller than normal. Shrunken. Or was it an illusion created by the fish-­tank illumination? He didn’t move, didn’t blink. In the eerie light, his lids appeared translucent purple, like the thinly peeled skin of a Bermuda onion. His eyeballs had receded deep into their orbits. Hollywood’s dramatic death scenes are a scam. A slug to the body destroys roughly two ounces of tissue, no more. A bullet doesn’t necessarily drop a man on the spot. To kill instantly, you have to shoot into the brain or high up in the spinal cord, or cause hemorrhage by hitting a main vessel or the heart. None of those things had happened to him. He’d survived until a late-­night dog walker stumbled upon him, unconscious and bleeding but still showing a pulse. The wee-­hours call had roused me from a deep sleep. Adrenaline rush. Shaky clawing up of the phone. Then the heart-­hammering drive across town. The argument to talk myself into the STICU. I hadn’t bothered with polite. Death by firearm depends on multiple factors: bullet penetration deep enough to reach vital organs, permanent cavity formation along the bullet’s path, temporary cavity formation due to transfer of the bullet’