Book Review: The Bone Collector’s Daughter

Reviewed by Andrea Marks-Joseph

This chaotic & gory quest to stop a cult from supernaturally resetting planet Earth is both an all-in adventure and a cheeky read.

In Izzy’s father’s suicide note, he admits to being the serial killer who went viral for the murder of six victims across the globe, seemingly unconnected but for the fact that all their femurs were taken as a souvenir. His letter describes these murders in detail and provides directions to find each person’s remains. When he’s found, his body had been “burned and blackened beyond recognition.”

In addition to the suicide note, Izzy’s father—though she prefers not to call him that; he’s Nathaniel now—left a puzzle box and a letter with his lawyer, who delivered it to Izzy in person at his funeral. When she was a child, Nathaniel made these sorts of puzzle boxes and designed interesting tricks for Izzy to discover, each box with its own opening method. Now, six months after his death (and six months of hell for Izzy), she learns that he set up a treasure hunt for her to follow, in hopes that she can “finish his work.”

Izzy—who enjoyed her life with her pet rat and her job as a cleaner for the “the local leader in crime scene cleanup”—wants no part of this mission. She immediately threw the first puzzle box away, recovered only because her friend Felix literally dumpster dived to salvage it. (Every time I see a dumpster from now on, I’ll be thinking of this line: “The dumpster seemed to be watching her approach, its plastic lids open like a beast eager for a treat.”) Author Morgan Mourne is so skilled in scene description in both mundane and horrifying ways I’ll never forget.

With each puzzle box, Nathaniel left a new letter for Izzy to decode, leading to clues about where she can find more femur bones and next steps. Each letter is less cryptic and more informative, sharing the truth behind why he did what he did. This still   doesn’t convince Izzy to follow the trail Nathaniel had set up for her. 

What really kickstarts Izzy’s dark, disturbing treasure hunt is the fact that creepy men keep following her around asking about items in her possession—one going so far as to show up at a blood-and-guts-soaked apartment she’s cleaning and forcing a femur into her hands. 

Izzy’s friend Felix—a collector of occultish artifacts and the owner of a bookshop called Hex & the City—and their mutual friend Dr. Nakahara—a professor of occult studies—help Izzy by connecting the clues she decodes from the letters to supernatural theories they’ve researched, eventually coming to the conclusion that Nathaniel was gathering seven specific femur bones in an attempt to keep them away from a doomsday cult. 

This specific cult is on a mission to gather the bones to supernaturally reset planet Earth, erasing all evidence humans were ever here, and putting themselves in charge of all nature when it begins afresh. With each new puzzle box they find comes a letter less cryptic; every set of instructions leading to a more dangerous mystical bone. “Each [bone] harbors massive destructive potential. If all seven bones are not united during the Convergence, then each bone will activate its own curse.”

“It wasn’t because I was some kind of monster,” Nathaniel writes in one of his letters to Izzy. “I thought I was saving you, saving everyone from unimaginable terrors.” 

The Bone Collector’s Daughter begins as a story about a young woman trying to escape her father’s dark legacy, forever written into her surname, but along the way, it transforms into a story of friends fighting to stop the exponential damage this cult is trying to inflict on the world. 

The further Izzy gets into this quest and the more letters from her father she reads, the more the story transforms—next into the complicated emotional journey of a daughter working through the trauma of everything her father has put her through. Was he doing good, just in his own way? His death starts to become more painful the more she learns. 

A nostalgic, emotional ribbon threads itself through the journey of Izzy learning that her father may have had honorable intentions, while she relives positive memories of her childhood and remembers the man she believed her dad was then. More than that, this quest leads Izzy to realizing that her father saw her as capable, brilliant, talented, and creative. What first felt like a burden now feels like a responsibility, a legacy she wants to uphold. 

“All these damned letters with their cryptic clues, puzzles, and references, and he always trusted her to figure the shit out. How could he have so much trust in her?”

And there’s lots of action: Felix is beat up so many times by the henchmen trying to   rob them of the puzzle box and bones that it becomes almost a running joke between them. We enter a world of gadgets built for surveillance and self-defense, and later, in order to protect the bones they’ve found from the cult, the trio signs up for a super high-tech safekeeping company that uses their biometric data to personally safeguard their belongings. “So we’re basically turning into walking passwords?”

In terms of content that readers should be aware of in this novel, other than the blood, gore, and murderous cults, it’s only mentioned once in passing, but we learn that her motherkilled herself and Felix’s younger brother diedin a similar situation involving a group on the hunt for occult-related items.

The tone of this book feels so much like The CW show iZombie and the TV series Lucifer, both of which understand the seriousness of solving the murders they’re tasked with, but their lead characters are such unserious people that it never gets too dark. It’s the casual, upbeat, bright and cheerful let’s-get-on-with-it tone of a day out with your quirkiest, closest friends—even if that day out is an errand to secure trackers and weapons because you’re being stalked by a cult.

This book will be a hit with readers of cozy murder mysteries, not because it’s cozy exactly, but for the way it revolves around a small group of bookshop friends in a situation that pulls them out of their regular social circle and requires they use each of their interests, hobbies, and connections to complete the mission successfully. I loved the playful chapter titles (Chapter 14: “Yeah, I Had Visions;” Chapter 57: “Uh-oh” Chapter 34 “Aunt Joan’s Creepy Frigging Basement,”) and I’d recommend this book (from personal experience) for readers with ADHD or brain fog, because the short chapters each include one fast-paced, focused scene, which enables readers who struggle with focus to dive into this story effortlessly.

I was often struck by the brilliance of the prose while reading even the most shocking, gory scenes. On rainy days outdoors, I’ll forever think of Izzy standing at her father’s graveside, in thick mud “that sucked at her shoes.” I could hear the sickening squelch as the guts dropped out of the bodies in one of the most unsettling scenes of the book.

Author Morgan Mourne somehow keeps this subject matter dark and upbeat. There are many amusing moments in this fierce adventure, like when Izzy learns that the seven mystical bones would wake at any signs of human destruction to the earth and damage to the planet’s natural state, and she blurts out “Okay, so the bones are definitely awake.”

While there are a few unanswered questions once you sit and think about it (and which I’m growing hopeful means a sequel), The Bone Collector’s Daughter is a thrilling, heartwarmingly horrifying tale that is gory and gruesome and a complete joy to read. An entertaining journey with genuine heart, unexpected friendships, disturbing darkness, shocking twists, and a cast of people you’d like to hang out with—if they weren’t officially on the radar of a vicious, murderous cult and the literal and hallucinated monsters they can unleash.

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