Mystery of the missing foot

Temperance Brennan, Kathy Reichs's forensic anthropologist, is on her way from Charlotte to Knoxville, when, as a member of NDMS's (National Disaster Medical System) DMORT (Disaster Mortuary Response Team), she's summoned to a plane crash in a forest on North Carolina's Great Smoky mountains.

Soon, in mask, gloves and jumpsuit, she's tagging, photographing and packing entrails, brain tissue and larger body parts; taking a break in the evening, she walks into the forest in search of serenity, only to find herself vying for possession of a human foot with a pack of coyotes.

Two days later she's suddenly, and with no explanation, accused of unprofessional conduct, mishandling evidence and trespass, and is bumped off the investigation. The newspapers go to town on the story and her colleagues avoid her.

Wiping the tears from her face, she sets out - with the assistance of Sheriff Lucy Crowe: tall, muscular, with frizzy red hair and Coke-bottle eyes - to clear her name and solve the mystery of the foot.

Kathy Reichs and Patricia Cornwell, those two geniuses of the autopsy table, appear to be attempting to outdo one another in Grand Guignol grotesquerie.

No sooner has Cornwell produced a serial killer covered in hair - as near to a werewolf as one can get, outside Buffy the Vampire Slayer - than Reichs over- trumps her with this novel, to which readers will need to bring a cast-iron stomach.

Implausible as the premise is, it is conveyed with some panache, and there's a neat twist in the plot, which displays an Agatha Christie-like profusion of red herrings. Reichs seems to be winning the battle, all the more as Brennan is considerably less annoying than Kay Scarpetta: though one could do with fewer briefs on her underwear situation.

In Henry Porter's new novel A Spy's Life, Bob Harland, a former MI6 agent, is now with the UN, investigating fresh water resources in Asia and eastern Europe. On his way back to New York in a UN jet, one minute he's chatting to an old friend, Alan Griswald, ex-CIA, now working for the War Crimes Tribunal, the next he's up to his neck in the mud of the East River, still strapped into his seat. The investigation puts the crash down to wake-vortex caused by a Boeing 767, but Harland is not convinced. Too many odd things are happening to him.

No sooner has he left his hospital bed than two thugs try to defenestrate him from his office in the UN building; his apartment is searched; a mysterious young man in a bobble hat is following him around and, most sinister of all, his former superior officer at MI6, Walter Vigo, treats him to dinner at Noonan's Steakhouse on Lexington and 48th.

Griswald, who died in the crash, seems to be the key, and, armed with a letter of authority from Benjamin Jaidi, the UN Secretary General, Harland sets out on a journey into the past, which takes him to England and to a bloody finale in Bosnia.