Disturbing the Bones by Andrew Davis and Jeff Biggers

Published by Melville House on October 22, 2024

Disturbing the Bones is a novel of racial injustice and an unsolved crime combined with a political thriller. The blend is interesting but it doesn’t quite work. The over-the-top plot is too unconvincing to generate suspense while the bland characters lack originality.

The story is set in Cairo, Illinois. Southern Illinois is south of the Mason-Dixon line and closer in spirit to Arkansas than northern Illinois. White business owners abandoned Cairo during the 1960s rather than obeying the law by hiring Black employees and serving Black customers. There isn’t much left of the place today. If the point of Disturbing the Bones is to remind readers of a racist history that racists would like to deny or conveniently forget, the point has merit. Maybe a novel will teach a history lesson that racists don't want their kids to learn in school. Still, a thriller needs to deliver thrills to earn a full recommendation.

The novel’s female protagonist is an archeologist named Mandy Moore. She’s been working in Vietnam (where she acquired an impressive knowledge of botany that turns out to be important for reasons that are too coincidental to be credible). Moore is called back to supervise a dig near Cairo, where plans to build a highway are temporarily halted by the discovery of ancient hunting sites. Moore has been hand selected by retired general Will Alexander, who has been a mentor and unofficial godfather to her. Both grew up in Southern Illinois. Alexander now runs a construction company that has built its wealth on government contracts for the military.

Moore discovers that the site contains the remains of villages from the Early Archaic Period. The dig unearths some human bones. The bones aren’t new, but they are far from prehistoric. Following protocol, she alerts federal officials who conduct DNA tests and identify the bones as those of Florence Jenkins, a Black civil rights reporter who went missing in 1978.

The novel’s male protagonist is Florence’s son. Randall Jenkins is now a Chicago police detective who has a troubled relationship with his adult daughter. Jenkins has always been obsessed with his mother’s disappearance and his obsession only grows when he is notified that his mother’s remains have been discovered in Cairo. The attempt to give Jenkins a personality fails to distinguish Jenkins from all the other fictional cops who give less attention to their family problems than the crime that obsesses them — in this case, a crime committed while Jenkins was still a child. Jenkins seems to hate everyone, including Moore, making him a decidedly unlikable protagonist.

The mystery of Florence’s death often moves to the background of a muddled plot that casts General Alexander as a parody of a melodramatic Bond villain. When he releases attack drones, he says “Go get them, my little darlings.” Dr. Evil of Austin Powers fame couldn’t have said it better. Alexander’s goal is to untrack worldwide arms treaty negotiations that would eliminate nuclear weapons after a little snafu in Russia turns yet another Russian city into a radioactive memory.

The authors earn credit for shrouding some supporting characters in mystery. An archeologist named Sandeep might or might not be a terrorist, given that he might or might not be flying drones over a military base, although why anyone believes a terrorist from Canada would be working on an archeological dig in Illinois is never made clear. A woman named Alison Foreman might or might not be a government agent and might or might not be a good guy or a bad guy. A clumsy reveal at the end brings her into better focus.

As an archeologist, Moore is positioned to play Indiana Jones. She must contend with evil people who want to cover up their role in Florence’s death by destroying the dig site and all the recovered artifacts. Given the unlikelihood that any evidence will be discovered that points to the truth, the coverup seems more likely to lead to imprisonment than the initial crime. The motivations of key characters just aren’t rational, even if they are necessary to keep the plot moving. Because it isn’t believable, the plot as a whole fails to build credible suspense, despite intermittent injections of mundane action scenes.

The ending is frankly depressing, although I suppose the authors deserve credit for avoiding an ending that is artificially happy. I’m not sure that substituting an ending that is artificially tragic is better, although the tragic aspect is likely meant to serve as a warning of where the nation might be heading. Really, if reading the news every morning isn’t a sufficient warning, I don’t know that a novel is going to reach you.

The story is marred by pedestrian prose. While I agree with the novel’s political viewpoint — racism is bad, the military-industrial complex is too powerful — there is little in the way of subtlety or nuance in a plot that sacrifices careful development of events and characters in favor of a story that I would expect from a bad made-for-TV movie. While the novel held my attention, it has too many flaws to earn a reservation-free recommendation.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS