Elle Marr. The Family Bones. Thomas and Mercer, 2023.

The Bible recognizes “the futile ways inherited from your forefathers” (I Peter 1:18). The Family Bones examines these ways in graphic psychological language.

Olivia Eriksen is our primary narrator. She has almost completed her Ph.D. in Psychology. All she has to do is complete her dissertation. She comes from a somewhat infamous family. She has a few uncles and cousins in prison. Her great uncle was a notorious serial killer. She has observed what she considers detachment and ASPD (antisocial personality disorder) in a number of her relatives including her own father, who has little to do with her.

Her studies have attempted to determine whether such behavior is innate or learned—or, as we say, nature or nurture. She is waiting for a family retreat to complete her studies. She hopes to interview different family members, especially her grandfather Edgar Eriksen, to perhaps get a sense of her family’s pathology, if there is one.

About half as many chapters are told by Birdie Tan, a popular podcaster. She follows cold cases, especially those involving victims who are Asian-American, as she is. She has learned about Li Ming Na, who disappeared about ten years ago. There was little done to follow up on her disappearance. Birdie attributes it to anti-Asian prejudice, but she comes to discover that Ming Na herself did a lot to cover her tracks.

Now Olivia is a student at University of California at Davis and Birdie lives farther south in San Diego. Both, though, end up at the Eriksen retreat center out in an Oregon mountain forest about three hours from Eugene. I call it the Eriksen retreat center because the old summer camp was recently bought out and renovated by Zane Ericksen, who has become a successful medical doctor and businessman. It will be the first time in ten years that the family has gotten together in such a way.

Many of the best mysteries involve the “closed room” mystery. One thinks, for example, of And Then There Were None set on an island or The Mousetrap set in a snowed-in house. In this case there are a series of storms that cause an avalanche that keeps everyone at the retreat center and keeps the police from coming in for a couple of days.

Alfred, who is probably Olivia’s favorite cousin, is the first to die. It might have been an accident, except that Alfred was supposed to meet Olivia for a tour of the retreat center’s wine cellar. He never shows up, and Olivia becomes a suspect. To say a whole lot more would be going into spoiler territory, but Alfred is only the first victim.

Besides the closed room mystery, there is another literary type which The Family Bones echoes. What happens to people who are cut off from the socializing influences of their culture? Think Heart of Darkness or The Lord of the Flies. At one point Olivia discovers the head of a decapitated elk covered with flies on the edge of the one of the fields. It is not a human head or a pig’s head, but we begin to understand that there will probably be no Poirot type to bring order. This is human nature at its most primal.

Interspersed among the chapters by Olivia and Birdie are some short documentary chapters. There are occasional excerpts from newspaper articles involving various crimes and other events associated in some way with the Eriksens. There are also some pages from a diary of a woman who falls in love with an Eriksen.

Birdie gets some useful information from two people about Li Ming Na. One person never identifies him- or herself, but the information seems reliable. Birdie actually meets with the other person a few times, and the information he provides sends her on her trip from Southern California to Central Oregon. For most of the book, the two threads seem unrelated, but we know they will come together at some point.

The Family Bones is no cozy. Spencer Quinn used his mystery narrative technique to make some similar tales oriented for a younger audience. Elle Marr could never adapt this for the kiddies. Its psychology is brutal. Is Olivia the psychologist brutal, too? It is not for everyone, but those who appreciate Stieg Larsson or Patricia Highsmith should savor The Family Bones.