Virals

About the Virals series

A YA spin-off from Kathy Reichs's adult Temperance Brennan novels, co-written with her son Brendan Reichs, Virals follows Tory Brennan — Tempe's grand-niece — and three friends on Loggerhead Island, South Carolina, where their scientist parents run a research institute. After rescuing a wolf-dog pup infected with an experimental canine parvovirus strain, the four teens are themselves infected, gaining heightened senses, strength and pack-like abilities that flare unpredictably under stress. What starts as a way of using their new abilities to solve local mysteries — beginning with a decades-old murder in Virals (2010) — escalates across the series into confrontations with a rival infected pack, corporate conspiracies around the virus's origins, and a government that wants the teens' abilities for its own purposes.

Reichs brings the same forensic-science rigor from the adult Temperance Brennan books to the YA series, grounding the biological premise and crime-solving in real procedure even as the plot leans further into thriller and light science-fiction territory as it progresses. Four interstitial novellas — Shock, Shift, Swipe and Spike — fill in shorter side-stories between the five full-length novels, following the same characters through smaller-scale mysteries and personal moments the main books don't have room for.