Below is the complete list of Kathy Reichs books in order. For each series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Temperance Brennan Books
- A Conspiracy of Bones (2018)
Published in 2018, A Conspiracy of Bones is listed as book #22 in the Temperance Brennan series. 
Publication Order of Temperance Brennan Collections Books
Publication Order of Temperance Brennan Short Stories/Novellas Books
Publication Order of Bones Books
with Max Allan Collins
Publication Order of Tory Brennan (Virals) Books
with Brendan Reichs
Publication Order of Standalone Books
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
Publication Order of The MatchUp Collection Books
About Kathy Reichs
Kathy Reichs is an American crime novelist and forensic anthropologist best known for creating Dr. Temperance “Tempe” Brennan, the forensic scientist at the center of her long-running thriller series. Her fiction is unusually grounded because it draws directly from her professional life: Reichs has worked in forensic anthropology, been certified by the American Board of Forensic Anthropology, and has been associated with forensic work in both North Carolina and Quebec. That real-world expertise gives her novels their defining texture, combining procedural investigation with the physical evidence of bones, decomposition, trauma, and identity.
Reichs made her fiction debut with Déjà Dead in 1997, introducing Temperance Brennan as a forensic anthropologist working in Montreal. The novel became an international bestseller and won the Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Novel, immediately positioning Reichs as one of the major forensic-thriller voices of the late 1990s. The Brennan books arrived at a moment when crime fiction was increasingly interested in laboratory work and specialist investigators, but Reichs stood apart because she was writing from inside the field rather than simply borrowing its language.
The Temperance Brennan series is the core of Reichs’s bibliography. Tempe Brennan works with skeletal and decomposed remains, often in cases where conventional identification is difficult or impossible. The novels move between professional settings, especially Quebec and the American South, and frequently draw on the kinds of cases that shape forensic anthropology: mass graves, disaster recovery, historic remains, unidentified victims, and murder investigations where science must recover a person’s story from the body itself. Books such as Death du Jour, Fatal Voyage, Grave Secrets, and Bones to Ashes show how Reichs blends technical detail with suspense, using science not as decoration but as the engine of the mystery.
Reichs’s writing style is direct, evidence-driven, and tense. Her plots often begin with a fragment of the dead—a bone, a body, a hidden site—and widen into larger questions about violence, corruption, memory, and institutional failure. Tempe Brennan is not a detached genius observing crime from a safe distance; she is frequently pulled into danger because the evidence she reads threatens living people as much as it speaks for the dead. That combination of professional authority and personal risk gives the series its momentum.
Outside the adult Brennan novels, Reichs also expanded the universe through the young adult Virals series, written with Brendan Reichs. Those books follow Tory Brennan, Tempe’s great-niece, and mix science, mystery, and adventure for a younger readership. The connection to Temperance Brennan gives the series a recognizable family link, but the tone is more youthful and speculative than the adult forensic thrillers.
Reichs is also closely tied to the television series Bones, which was inspired by her life and her Temperance Brennan novels. She served as a producer on the show, and its success brought her work to a wider audience, even though the television version of Brennan differs significantly from the character in the books. For readers approaching Reichs’s bibliography, the novels remain the best expression of what makes her distinctive: forensic science treated seriously, crime stories built from physical evidence, and a heroine whose authority comes from expertise earned in the lab, in the field, and under pressure.