When Kathy Reichs, a forensic anthropologist who grew up in Chicago, published her first academic paper titled "Cranial suture eccentricities: a case in which precocious closure complicated determination of sex and commingling" in the Journal of Forensic Science in 1989, she probably couldn’t have deduced that she would one day go on to pen some of the most thrilling and engaging crime fiction novels of her generation.

But that is exactly what happened.