Before the Dawn

Dark Angel

If you don't know the show: take one kick-ass, bike-riding genetically-modified girl, created in a government laboratory to become the perfect soldier. Let her escape from the lab and put her on the streets. Throw in more genetically-modified 'siblings' who she tries to locate and pit them against sinister and corrupt government forces. Light torch paper, stand back. 
 
If you do know the show: this novel fills in some of the gaps from the ten years between Max's escape from Manticore in 2009 and her current adventures in Seattle in 2019. We meet for the first time Original Cindy, Sketchy, Kendra and Normal, as well as Lydecker and Logan Cale. 
 
We see Max working as a cat-burglar in Los Angeles, and then moving to Seattle where she meets various figures from her past and future, and gets involved with a multi-millionaire art collector. The book culminates in a thrilling confrontation at the top of the Seattle Space Needle, where one of Max's siblings dies in order to save her.

TV Tie-in

Bones

Tie-in to the Fox and Sky television series Bones, featuring Temperance Brennan, a world-class forensic anthropologist who, in her spare time, writes bestselling novels about a character called Kathy Reichs

'Let other crime shows compete for your attention by growing ever more sick, gory and graphic. Bones is built on a more traditional and solid foundation: the strength of its characters...the season's most appealing new crime fighters'

'I've been yearning for a forensic anthropologist to turn up for some time now, preferably one who combines a feisty sexuality with a prickly reticence, and a brain of forbidding power with a cuddly proficiency in martial arts and sharpshooting. Bones answered all these prayers, by unleashing the mighty force that is Temperance Brennan'

'smouldering performances make Bones a crime series you can really get your teeth into... assured and amusing'

'This is good, lively, perhaps too fast-moving fun and has some excellent lines'

Kathy Reichs is forensic anthropologist for the Offices of the Chief Medical Examiner, State of North Carolina, and for the Laboratorie de Sciences Judiciaires et de Médecine Légale for the province of Quebec. A professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, she divides her time between Charlotte and Montreal and is a frequent expert witness in criminal trials.

Dr. Temperance Brennan, a highly skilled forensic anthropologist who works at the Jeffersonian Institution and writes novels as a sideline, has an uncanny ability to read clues left behind in a victim's bones. Law enforcement calls upon her to assist with murder investigations when the standard methods of identifying a body are useless. Brennan often finds herself partnered with special investigator Seely Booth of the FBI's Homicide Investigation Unit. Booth, a former Army sniper who mistrusts science and scientists, believes the key to solving crimes lies in discovering the truth from good old-fashioned detective work. 
 
Brennan's equally brilliant colleagues at the Jeffersonian's Medico-Legal Lab include earthy and bawdy Angela Montenegro, who's created a unique way to render an original crime scene in a 3-D computer image; Brennan's assistant, Zack Addy, a young prodigy whose genius IQ actually gets in the way of finishing any of the several doctorates he's begun; "the bug guy" Dr. Jack Hodgins, who's an expert on insects, spores and minerals, but conspiracy is his hobby; and Brennan's boss, the imposing lab director Dr. Daniel Goodman. 
 
"We hope my readers will realize that it's another manifestation of Tempe, and that they are in on this inside joke" says the real Reichs

Max Allan Collins

Skin Game

Someone is killing and skinning normal humans in Seattle.  At first, this news barely causes a ripple in Terminal City, the haven for the transgenic community.  They have problems of their own. But as the killings on the outside continue, Joshua comes to Max with his suspicions that the murderer may be one of their own.  While some of the transgenics would be in favor of letting the killer go free, Max argues that this is exactly the mindset that causes the humans to fear them.  If they don't stop the killer, it will be just one more thing the humans can hold against them.  Max and her most trusted aides, Logan, Joshua, Alec, and Original Cindy start investigating the crimes. But what they discover will shock even the most jaded among them - and expose a sinister agenda that leads to an old, nefarious foe-

Max Allan Collins

Books by Max Allan Collins

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