MONTREAL – It’s a long way from Quebec to Afghanistan — except when it’s renowned forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs taking a leap of imagination for the latest in her series of “Bones” crime novels.

In “Bones of the Lost,” protagonist Temperance Brennan is called upon to investigate the possibility that a young U.S. Marine is being set up for a war crime in the shooting of unarmed Afghan villagers. It all comes down to the direction the bullets came from.

“I drew on a case I’d worked on years ago in Quebec of an individual who was pronounced dead of a suicide, shot in his chest,” she said. The victim, who was found in his car in 1969, was a police detective.

“The family always thought it had been a murder, that he was shot in the back.”

That body was exhumed 30 years after the man died and Reichs was called in to examine the remains, which were now mainly bones, to help determine the bullet’s trajectory. The suicide ruling stood.

She decided to set that part of the story in Afghanistan after visiting there on a United Service Organizations tour and meeting the troops, but it’s not the first time the Chicago-born Reichs has drawn on one of the real cases she’s encountered in a lengthy career as a forensic anthropologist.

Besides working with the Quebec medical-legal institute, the province’s main crime lab, Reichs was also a consultant with the chief medical examiner’s office in North Carolina.

Now splitting her time in Montreal with her job as an anthropology professor at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, she has also testified at the UN Tribunal on genocide in Rwanda and helped identify remains from the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York.

After writing journal articles and textbooks, she decided to give fiction a try after being promoted to full professor at UNC-Charlotte and started her first book in 1994.

“I thought fiction might be fun,” she said in a telephone interview from Toronto, where she was promoting “Bones of the Lost.”

“I had just worked on a serial murder case in Montreal so I kind of had the bare bones, I guess you’d say, of the story so that all came together. Back then, I don’t think anyone knew what forensic anthropology was so I thought it might bring my science to a broader audience.”

“Deja Dead,” published in 1997, was a bestseller and won her the 1997 Ellis crime writing award for Best First Novel.

“Bones of the Lost” is Reichs’ 16th novel starring Temperance Brennan although she’s also done a series featuring Brennan’s great-niece Tory for young adults. The “Bones” TV series is based on her books and she’s written an episode titled “The Dude in the Dam” which is scheduled for broadcast Nov. 19.

Reichs says there are elements of her in her protagonist, although she says the TV version is younger and very socially awkward. The version in the books is older, more experienced and has more polished social skills.

“I’d have to say — hopefully — I am more similar to ‘Book Tempe’ than ‘TV Tempe.’”

In “Bones of the Lost,” which is in stores on Tuesday, Brennan is juggling the wrapup of her divorce with the apparent hit-and-run of a teenage girl which spirals into an investigation of international human smuggling.

On top of that and the killing in Afghanistan, she’s also trying to unravel the mystery behind mummified dogs suspected to be stolen antiquities.

“Every now and then, I’ll get some odd object like that, a shrunken head or something,” says Reichs, again suggesting the treasure trove of angles her forensics jobs yields for her fiction. “I’ve had any number of experiences with strange things like that.”

While she does change some of the details of the crimes she uses in her work for ethical and legal reasons, Reichs is firm that all the science is real. There are no made-up procedures in her books, she insists.

And she doesn’t rely on fancy gizmos like the sleuths in TV’s “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” which predated “Bones” by a few years.

Reichs acknowledges there is a trick to putting the science in her stories and keeping it accurate.

“I’m kind of a fanatic about that,” she says. “But keep it short, keep it jargon-free, make it entertaining so the reader can learn something but not feel like they’re reading a textbook.”

In the new novel, for instance, Brennan’s examination of the bones of the hit-and-run victim reveal an approximate age for her as well as information on the car that struck her.

Reichs, who writes every day, is halfway through her next novel — it will be called “Bones Never Lie” and will be set in Montreal. She’s rare among internationally recognized crime writers in using Canadian locales in her books and has set others in Yellowknife and New Brunswick.

Montreal has been the setting for several books and Reichs describes the city as a “living, breathing part of the story.”

“I really spent a lot of time trying to get a feel for the city,” she said. “I’ll drive around or walk around visiting different locations that I’m going to use to make sure I’m getting it right.”

It hasn’t hurt Montreal’s tourist industry — many of her fans have told her they’ve come to the city and visited locations mentioned in her books.

That’s not the only feedback Reichs gets. She says her professional life is informed by both her writing and forensics careers. Her medical-legal casework certainly gives her ideas for fiction while her writing makes her look at things a little differently.

“I think writing fiction makes me notice more, notice the kinds of things you wouldn’t otherwise pay attention to, like how do you describe the smell of a decomposed body or what sound does a fly make buzzing against the florescent light in the autopsy room.”

In the meantime, there’s no shortage of ideas for what may next befall her characters.

“Ideas are never a problem,” she says with a chuckle. “It’s finding time to do it all.”