As a teenager, Dan Brown changed my brain chemistry.
My obsession with his books grew from my more youthful, and more naive, obsession with Indiana Jones — back before I understood that cultural artifacts should probably stay with their culture of origin. Dan Brown made me feel sophisticated and smart, creating an affection for political thrillers that eventually dulled. Now, I tend to approach the genre the same way I approach watching football with my spouse. I always claim I’ll just pay attention to it in the background, but within 15 minutes I’m engrossed and yelling at the refs.
Disturbing the Bones by Andrew Davis and Jeff Biggers (2024) is a slow-burn thriller that begins as a detective story and ends enmeshed in the political. The novel splits its time between Detective Randall Jenkins, a Chicago detective with a lengthy tenure in his field, and Dr. Molly Moore, a near-celebrity archaeologist conducting research in Cairo, Illinois. When Molly’s team unearths a modern human skeleton, its DNA reveals it to be Florence Jenkins — Randall’s mother, who has been missing for four decades. The murder becomes the framework for a broader political struggle, solidifying Randall’s motivations even while his other obligations attempt to rip him elsewhere.
Molly and Randall serve as compelling counterparts as they navigate their growing professional partnership. Molly’s youth and casual approach to the world conflicts with Randall’s age and gravity. Their collaboration is further complicated by their diametrically opposed family histories. Although they both called Cairo home at one point in their lives, Randall’s Blackness caused him to suffer racism and discrimination, while Molly’s family was directly involved in the systems that caused this suppression. They navigate this shared history with as much difficulty as one would imagine, adding credence to the tension of their interactions.
The novel’s governmental juxtapositions — an election focused on the Democratic, female Adams against the Republican, male Waller — are thinly veiled insertions of recent political movements. Language used by both candidates and their supporters are used to orient the reader to the novel’s universe, which is so closely aligned with the real world that, at times, it begs for a lighter hand. Occasionally it feels plagiaristic; at other times, a parody.
The novel’s first section, “September,” is a strong start, but as the primary conflict is introduced in the second section, the strength of the language is sacrificed a bit. Davis and Biggers slip into the passive voice so often that it pulls the reader out of the flow — the words “had been” become the novel’s kryptonite. This is further exacerbated by moments when the omniscient narrator tells the reader something that the characters do not know, which can disrupt the tension.
Overall, Disturbing the Bones has excellent bones as a political thriller. The global implications of the broader plot heighten at an exceptional pace, making the last 100 pages fly by.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s March 2025 issue.
