Published October 12, 2023

BRENDA O’FARRELL
The 1019 Report

Science has debunked the fiction that lightning never strikes twice. But can science and fiction create it? Lightning, that is?

The answer to that question could be discovered Sunday in Hudson as the ever-impressive literary festival known as Storyfest sets to light up our imaginations with the launch of its 22nd edition by welcoming New York Times bestselling author Kathy Reichs.

Reichs, earlier this year, published her 22nd mystery thriller featuring her recurring central character, forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan. The series, based loosely on Reichs’s own career as one of about a dozen forensic anthropologists in North America, catapulted to broad-based recognition 26 years ago with her first novel Déja Dead. It hit bestsellers lists across North America and the United Kingdom, a trend that has continued with each subsequent instalment. It also spun off the television series Bones in 2005, which ran for 12 seasons, becoming the longest running drama produced by the Fox network in the United States.

Reflecting on her career as a writer, Reichs is hard-pressed to explain her success.

“It took off so quickly and so hard,” she said in an interview with The 1019 Report recently, adding that her first book was so successful, “it certainly changed my career trajectory.”

Reichs’ latest book, The Bone Hacker, published by Simon & Schuster, is a “ripped from the headlines” story based on the islands of Turks and Caicos. But it opens with a scene of the main character heading out on a boat in the St. Lawrence River to watch one of the Montreal’s international fireworks shows when the skies open up and a meteorological microburst throws the small watercraft crashing about in the dark waves.

The scene is one of many in Reichs’s books over the years that are set in Montreal, a city she has a fond attachment to. And one of the reasons she is looking forward to her visit to Hudson.

“I always love coming to Canada,” she said.

For many years, Reichs commuted to Montreal, where she kept an apartment. After completing her PhD at Northwestern University in Illinois, she began to teach at the University of North Carolina. From there, she took part in a faculty exchange program, that launched here relationship with Montreal, where she taught at Concordia and McGill universities and began to consult on cases with the Quebec Laboratoire de sciences judiciaires et de médecines légales.

She has also worked around the world, consulting on cases from genocide in Rwanda, to the World Trade Centre site in New York City, to cases in the Canadian north.

She has used many of the cases she has worked on as the starting points for her fiction.

Reichs has retired from teaching and consulting, spending most of her time now writing. She has another book in the works set to be released next year.

Kathy Reichs will be at Storyfest on Sunday, Oct. 15, at 2 p.m. at the Stephen F. Shaar Community Centre, 394 Main Rd., Hudson. Tickets are $20 and can be purchased online at greenwoodstoryfest.com, and as cash purchases only at Que de Bonnes Choses, 484-B, Main Rd. in Hudson. 

Other Storyfest events to watch for:

  • Montreal’s Anita Anand will discuss her novel, A Convergence of Solitudes, which looks at  the lives of two families across Partition-era India, Vietnam’s Operation Babylift and two Quebec referendums. She will be at the Hudson Creative Hub on Oct. 19 at 7:30 p.m. 
  • Former CBC journalist Waubgeshig Rice will discuss his second novel Moon of the Turning Leaves, the continues the story a tight-knit Anishinaabe community more than a decade after a major blackout compels them to return to their ancestral ways. He will be at the Hudson Creative Hub on Oct. 25 at 7:30 p.m. 
  • Montreal food writer and former Montreal Gazette restaurant critic Lesley Chesterman will share her insights from her recently published book Make Every Day Delicious at the Stephen F. Shaar Community Centre on Oct. 29 at 2 p.m.
  • Former Hudson High student and McGill University alumna, Dr. Maureen Mayhew will talk about her memoir Hand on My Heart that draws focuses on her experience working Doctors Without Borders in Afghanistan at the Hudson Creative Hub on Nov. 7 at 7:30 p.m. 
  • Canadian actor R.H. Thomson will share his thoughts on his new memoir, By the Ghost Light, that looks at how the stories of our past shape our future at the Hudson Village Theatre on Nov. 27 at 7:30 p.m.

Cutlines:

New York Times bestselling author Kathy Reichs opens another edition of Storyfest in Hudson on Sunday.

Her latest novel launched earlier this year is her 22nd in a series of works featuring her loosely autobiographical character, forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan. It opening scene is set in Montreal.

Credit:

Courtesy of Simon & Schuster

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