Finished it not long ago and thought it was OK. Not great, but not terrible.
On p. 218 of the hardcover first edition, Det. Len Fenerman goes through the police evidence box on the girl’s disappearance:
He had led a team back into the field, and they had dug and then dug again. Finally they found an old Coke bottle at the opposite end of the field. There it was, a solid link: fingerprints matching Mr. Harvey’s prints, which were all over his house, and fingerprints matching those on my birth certificate…
Harvey was the rapist/killer, of course. But I don’t recall any earlier reference to the girl’s birth certificate. Was this a continuity error?
I haven’t read the book, but it sounds like the author was making the assumption that a child’s fingerprints are recorded on her birth certificate, suggesting that this would be the official record of the girl’s fingerprints. Of course this is not correct, since birth certificates in the U.S. do not include fingerprints (or footprints, although they are sometimes included in unofficial souvenir certificates from the hospital).
I’ll fanwank it, though it still doesn’t make much sense. In November 1973, Susie Salmon, fourteen, asked her parents if she could keep her birch certificate herself rather having it in their possession; she was feeling grown up and wanted more responsibility. They agreed and handed it to her, and she put it in a box or file in her bedroom. Very few people had handled that particular document – Susie, Mr. & Mrs. Salmon, and the clerk at the county courthouse who gave it to them. The police had access to the latter three, and so used the certificate to get a sample of Susie’s prints for comparisons.
Still rather thin, I know. I noticed that while reading, but it doesn’t matter to me. Lovely Bones isn’t primarily about plot anyway, but rather the emotional and spiritual effects of Susie’s murder on her family, friends, and murderer.
Ah, I misread that. It wasn’t Harvey’s fingerprints on her birth certificate; it was her fingerprints, matching those on her birth certificate, on the Coke bottle he had offered her!