Winter has come to North Carolina and Temperance Brennan is content to dote on her daughter Katy, finally returned to civilian life from the army. One night, they find a box on the back porch. Inside: a very fresh human eyeball. GPS coordinates etched into the eyeball lead to a Benedictine monastery where an equally macabre discovery awaits. More bodies turn up to complicate matters and each mimics a homicide that a younger Tempe had been called in to analyse.

Tempe is at a loss to establish the motive for what is going on and then Katy disappears. With the help of Erskine “Skinny” Slidell, and Andrew Ryan, Tempe’s Montreal-based beau, they discover that revenge is the real motive. Tempe will have to revisit the past to unravel the present.

In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Kathy Reichs about living and breathing Temperance Brennan, the bizarre and gruesome real-life cases that find their way into her books, and how science can be the catalyst for casting great characters, stories and settings.