
Dr. Temperance Brennan, a forensic anthropologist who works at the Jeffersonian Institution and also writes books, has an impressive ability to read clues from victims' bones. Consequently, law enforcement calls her to assist with investigations when remains are so badly decomposed, burned or destroyed that standard identification methods are useless. Brennan is teamed with Special Agent Seeley Booth, a former Army sniper, who mistrusts science and scientists when it comes to solving crimes but who has developed respect for Brennan, both professionally and personally.

When high-school classmates reunite to unearth a time capsule buried 20 years earlier, they find the corpse of an adolescent friend inside; while combing through the victim's life, the team members rehash their own teen years.

After construction workers find an archbishop's body with the kneecaps surgically removed, the team returns to the case of the Widow's Son serial killer.

Three days before Christmas the body of a bearded man in a tailor-made Santa outfit turns up in a sewer; Brennan visits her father in prison and plots a nontraditional holiday reunion.

The team investigates the death of an a cappella singer whose body was found in a lab rat; Hodgins applies for an experimental nerve regeneration study; Booth tries to plan a summer trip with Parker; a new intern joins the lab.