Book Review: "The Unquiet Bones" by Loreth Anne White

Human bones are found one day beneath a chapel on the grounds of a ski resort. It appears they’ve been there for nearly 50 years. The evidence links the strangely well-preserved remains to 16-year-old Annalise Jansen, who went missing in the mid-1970s.

Detective Jane Munro, assigned to handle cold cases as a punishment for acting out, knows what it’s like to have a loved one go missing. Her fiancé disappeared while on a hiking trip, and shortly thereafter she found she was pregnant. Jane is determined that Annalise’s family will get the closure it needs once she and her colleagues figure out what happened.

Quite a lot went on the night Annalise went missing in 1976. Six of her closest friends made a pledge to stand by each other’s alibis, and even were dubbed “The Shoreview Six” by the press back then. But when news about Annalise’s remains being recovered goes public, it threatens to fracture the promises and expose the fears and assumptions that have lingered in the back of their minds all these years.

I love police procedural-type books, and while this is a mystery as well, I found the partnership between the police and a forensic anthropologist to be fascinating. There were definitely some things I never knew were possible to detect from bones.

I really enjoyed Jane’s character and how she balanced her own issues with her determination to solve the case. I felt like there definitely were hints that this could be the first book in a series, perhaps teaming her up with Dr. Quinn, the forensic anthropologist, and I’d love that.

The pacing of the book was a bit uneven; it was very slow at first and then so many secrets were revealed it was hard to determine what were facts and what were distractions. There also were so many characters to keep track of, and in some cases they had different names and/or nicknames back in the 1970s, so I had to write stuff down.