(Before 'The Pilot')
Thank you for reviewing my story. I appreciate it.
I don't own Bones.
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Browsing in the bookstore, Booth moved from the science fiction section of the store to shelves that contained Mysteries. He knew it was probably ironic or something that he liked to read them, but he found some of them to be a pretty good read. Some mystery writers made him cringe and he'd learned to avoid those writers, but he was drawn to certain authors that wrote their mysteries the way he investigated crimes and looked forward to their latest releases.
As he moved down the aisle, he noticed a book propped up against the books instead of being properly shelved, the front of the book exposed to any passerby that cared to look. Shocked, he grasped the book in his hand and stared at the author's name printed on the bottom of the book jacket 'Temperance Brennan'.
"It can't be. Not my Temperance Brennan." Booth flipped the book over to look at the back of the jacket and found himself staring a picture of Dr. Temperance Brennan, forensic anthropologist at the Jeffersonian and the bane of his existence.
Well, maybe not bane but it did feel like it sometimes. He had worked with her on a case because Cam had recommended her and Brennan had proved to be brilliant when it came to her profession, but her pride and lack of modesty had been a trial for him. She had helped him solve a murder case that his boss had wanted to close down due to lack of evidence. Santana didn't want him wasting resources on a case that seemed unsolvable, but with Brennan's help he'd found the killer and that man was now in prison serving life for the murder of Gemma Arrington.
After the case was solved, Brennan had worried that the evidence wasn't enough and voiced that doubt in front of Gemma Arrington's mother. Worried that Jocelyn would take Brennan's words to heart, Booth had tried to stop his partner by pulling her from the room. He knew that he had made a mistake when they'd arrived in the hallway and she'd slapped him. Calling him a bully had been over the top and the slap had been uncalled for, but she'd walked away vowing never to work with him again and that was where they were at the moment.
Curious, he opened the book and looked at the summary on the inside of the jacket. The story premise seemed to be interesting, but the blurb printed at the bottom of the page seemed to be the standard hype for most books. Bred in the Bone, a mystery that will leave you wanting more. "Oh yeah? We'll see about that." Adding the book to a load he had under his arm, he carried the books to the front of the store, paid for them and left. Once he was at his SUV, he opened the passenger area and placed the books on the floor.
"God knows what she's like as a writer . . . at least she should avoid the pitfalls that writers that don't work in law enforcement make."
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Sipping beer while reading Brennan's book, Booth almost spit it out when he got to FBI Special Agent Andy Lister. The agent in her book was a former Olympic boxer who'd graduated from Harvard and spoke six languages, but Booth recognized window dressing when he saw it. Brennan had based her FBI agent on him and the other characters were clearly based upon the people she worked with. It was so obvious that anyone that had ever met him or the squints at the Lab would recognize the characters in her book immediately.
The plot was interesting and the scientific methods used when verifying some of the evidence found near and on the victim was accurate. The victim had been partially eaten by weasels which was kind of gross but then again, he'd seen victims partially eaten by dogs and cats, so it wasn't a stretch. She'd used the proper methods used at crime scenes and she hadn't used any short cuts when explaining the methodology of the FBI. Pleased, he continued to read the book and appreciated the hard work she had put into it.
"What the hell?" Booth came to page 123 and read about Agent Andy having sex with Amanda and wondered where that had come from. "I mean Angela is cute, but I never showed any interest in Angela when I worked with her. I was pure business. . . wasn't I? . . . Yes, I was."
His cheeks a little flushed after reading the very intimate paragraphs, Booth chuckled. "Damn, I didn't know you had that in you, Bones." The story went on and Booth found it hard to put the book down.
The noises from his stomach finally caught his attention and he placed the book down on the coffee table. Glancing at the clock on the wall in the kitchen, Booth was surprised to find that he'd read for a solid four hours before his stomach complained that it had missed dinner. Anxious to get back to the book, he made a ham and cheese sandwich, grabbed another bottle of beer and carried it back into the living room, placing everything on the coffee table. After a short visit to the bathroom, he was back on the couch, his book in one hand and the sandwich in the other.
Slowly eating his sandwich, he moved through the pages and found that Brennan's character Kathy was pretty athletic in bed and he wondered if she was writing from experience. "You're definitely not a cold fish are you, Bones. A little hot tempered . . . grabbing your arm . . . I just wanted to get you out of the room. I wasn't trying to hurt you. I'd never do that, but I guess you didn't know that." He worried about his temper and grabbing a woman's arm was borderline abuse, at least as far as he was concerned. Perhaps he could have found a better way to get her to stop talking in front of Jocelyn, but that was water under the bridge. He couldn't undo what had been done.
The story had a good balance between the case and the lives of the characters. He wondered if Brennan wrote the characters the way she did because that was the way she saw the people around her or she was just using her friends as a template for her characters and created more interesting lives for them. Either way, he came off pretty good in her books. He was the hero in her novel and he had never dreamed that would happen. "Huh, maybe she's not as pissed at me as she appears."
He hoped to someday get her to work with him again, but since she wouldn't take his phone calls, it wasn't likely that would ever happen. "She's damned brilliant and I could use someone like her on my team." He'd been mulling over how to get her to listen to him and he hoped he'd come up with something someday. She was a valuable resource and the FBI could benefit from working with her. He was convinced that her brilliance as a forensic anthropologist and his brilliant work as an investigator would make them formidable. He just needed her to see that.
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