Patricia Cornwell
Author of Post-Mortem
About the Author
Patricia Cornwell was born in Miami, Florida on June 9, 1956. When she was nine years old, her mother tried to give her and her two brothers to evangelist Billy Graham and his wife to care for. For a while the children lived with missionaries since their mother was unable to care for them. After show more graduating from Davidson College in 1979, she worked for The Charlotte Observer eventually covering the police beat and winning an investigative reporting award from the North Carolina Press Association for a series of articles on prostitution and crime in downtown Charlotte. Her award-winning biography of Ruth Bell Graham, the wife of Billy Graham, A Time for Remembering, was published in 1983. From 1984 to 1990, she worked as a technical writer and a computer analyst at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Richmond, Virginia. While working for the medical examiner, she began to write novels. Although the award-winning novel Postmortem was initially rejected by seven different publishers, once it was published in 1990 it became the only novel ever to win the Edgar, Creasey, Anthony, and Macavity awards as well as the French Prix du Roman d'Adventure, in one year. She is the author of the Kay Scarpetta series, the Andy Brazil series, and the Winston Garano series. She has also written two cookbooks entitled Scarpetta's Winter Table and Food to Die For; a children's book entitled Life's Little Fable; and non-fiction works like Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper - Case Closed. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Series
Works by Patricia Cornwell
Patricia Cornwell CD Audio Treasury Volume Two: Postmortem | Body of Evidence [Abridged Audiobook] (2006) 17 copies
Five Scarpetta Novels (Cause of Death, Unnatural Exposure, Point of Origin, Black Notice, and Trace) (2011) 8 copies
Kay Scarpetta set #1-14 5 copies
Cause innaturali 3 copies
Cornwell Patricia 3 copies
Livore 2 copies
Flesh and Blood: Free Sampler 2 copies
The Body Farm / From Potter's Field / Unnatural Exposure / Blow Fly / Trace / Book of the Dead / Scarpetta / The Scarpetta Factor (1990) 2 copies
Patricia Cornwell Andy Brazil/Hammer & Gareno Series (5 Book Set) : Hornet's Nest, Southern Cross, Isle of Dogs, At Risk, The Front (1998) 2 copies
Unnatural Exprosure 2 copies
Point of Origin 27 Copy Displa 2 copies
7 Patricial Cornwell Books--Portrait Of A Killer,Predator,Cause of Death,Isle of Dogs,Body of Evidence,Cause of Death,Blow Fly (2003) 2 copies
À double tranchant 2 copies
Second Chance Tuesday 2 copies
Kay Scarpetta 21: Dust 1 copy
Kay Scarpetta 24: Chaos 1 copy
Kay Scarpetta 19: Red Mist 1 copy
Kay Scarpetta 16: Scarpetta 1 copy
Kay Scarpetta 14: Predator 1 copy
Kay Scarpetta 13: Trace 1 copy
Kay Scarpetta 12: Blow Fly 1 copy
The Scarpetta Factor 1 copy
Touch of Darkness 1 copy
Split Image (2010) 1 copy
Point Of Sale Book # ( 1 copy
Calliphora 1 copy
Ritratto di un assasino 1 copy
NË RREZIK 1 copy
Scarpettas Winter Table 1 copy
Phantom 1 copy
Totenbuch 1 copy
The Last Precinct 1 copy
Star Quest 1 copy
Salattu henkilöllisyys 1 copy
CONTÁGIO PERVERSO 1 copy
Dove comincia l'uomo 1 copy
Konseki 1 (痕跡 上) 1 copy
Kay Scarpetta Series : 1-17 1 copy
Predator, Part 2 1 copy
Predator, Part 1 1 copy
Konseki 2 (痕跡 下) 1 copy
Scarpetta, Part 2 1 copy
Scarpetta, Part 1 1 copy
Trace / Predator 1 copy
Kay Scarpetta set #1-7 1 copy
The Last Precinct / Predator 1 copy
Patricia Cornwell (Set of 5) Black Notice; Blow Fly; Trace; Predator; Scarpetta Factor (2009) 1 copy
Harlequin 1 copy
Personalities along the track...: Gladstone's tribute to our railway workers (2001) — Editor — 1 copy
Kay Scarpetta set #8-14 1 copy
Punto di origine 1998 1 copy
Zona de muerte 1 copy
Luonnoton kuolema 1 copy
Identiteit onbekend 1 copy
roofdier 1 copy
Deaths Acre 1 copy
Kay Scarpetta Series 9-12 1 copy
Playing for the Ashes 1 copy
Big Day in Moscow: Sketchbook Favorite Place Coloring Book: Vol. 2: Adult Activity Book (Volume 2) (2016) 1 copy
Patricia Cornwell Gift Set: "Isle of Dogs", "Cruel and Unusual", "Body of Evidence" No.1 (2001) 1 copy
Link 1 copy
CONTÁGIO CRIMINOSO 1 copy
Associated Works
The Book That Changed My Life: 71 Remarkable Writers Celebrate the Books That Matter Most to Them (2006) — Contributor — 411 copies, 18 reviews
Reader's Digest Select Editions 2000 v01 #247: Black Notice / Eddie's Bastard / Boundary Waters / The Innocents Within (2000) — Contributor — 49 copies
Time Life Book Digest: It Doesn't Take a Hero / All That Remains / Honest Illusions / Double Deuce (1992) 3 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Legal name
- Cornwell, Patricia Carroll Daniels
- Birthdate
- 1956-06-09
- Gender
- female
- Education
- Davidson College (BA | 1979 | English)
- Occupations
- reporter
technical writer (Office of Chief Medical Examiner of Virginia)
computer analyst - Short biography
- Her first crime novel, Postmortem, was published by Scribner’s in 1990. Initially rejected by seven major publishing houses, it became the first novel to win the Edgar, Creasey, Anthony, and Macavity awards as well as the French Prix du Roman d’Aventure in a single year. In Postmortem, Cornwell introduced Dr. Kay Scarpetta as the intrepid Chief Medical Examiner of the Commonwealth of Virginia. In 1999, Dr. Scarpetta herself won the Sherlock Award for best detective created by an American author
- Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Miami, Florida, USA
- Places of residence
- Miami, Florida, USA
Montreat, North Carolina, USA
New York, New York, USA - Associated Place (for map)
- USA
Members
Reviews
I’ve been reading the Scarpetta books for a number of years. I read the first seven back in the 1990s, but started the series again a few years ago – and have been working my way through them ever since. I was looking forward to the television adaptation, which had been promised for many years, and when it was finally made, and broadcast this year, I watched it… Despite the stellar cast, there were changes I’d not expected. It was also based on the plot of this book, Autopsy, the show more series’ twenty-fifth novel, which I hadn’t read at the time.
Now I have. The most obvious changes in the TV series were: Pete Marino is married to Scarpetta’s sister, Dorothy, and niece Lucy’s wife and adopted son are both dead. None of which was the case in the preceding book, Chaos.
However, Marino is indeed married to Dorothy in Autopsy, which appeared five years after Chaos and, more pertinently, after the pandemic. Lucy’s family apparently died of covid while living in London (Cornwell outright lies here and implies the UK fatalities were much greater than those of the US; in fact, far more people, and more people per capita, died in the US). The romance between Marino and Dorothy was hinted at in Chaos, and before that in Flesh and Blood and Depraved Heart, but there is no good reason I could discern why Janet and Desi should be killed off. (Or for Janet’s change of nationality to British, when in the books she is ex-FBI and first met Lucy at Quantico.)
So, it seems the TV adaptation is mostly quite faithful (and yes, an AI Janet does feature in the novel). In terms of plot… Autopsy opens with Scarpetta back in Virginia and once again the Commonwealth Chief Medical Examiner, taking over from the incompetent and manipulative Elvin Reddy, who is apparently an old adversary of Scarpetta’s, although he wasn’t mentioned in earlier novels (as far as I remember). She is called to the house of a young woman who has disappeared, and who might be the victim in an ongoing murder investigation. A body was discovered beside some railway tracks in a park, and its hands had been removed. They quickly confirm the missing woman is the murder victim. She worked for a laboratory researching 3D-printed organs, and they discover she was a spy – corporate espionage, or for the Russians, they don’t know. She has an accomplice, who is aboard an orbiting laboratory operated by the same company. Except he’s gone rogue, murdered the other two astronauts, and fled in the Soyuz spacecraft.
Scarpetta is asked to help understand what happened in the orbital laboratory (it doesn’t crash on Earth, as it does in the TV series, because, well, things falling from orbit rarely reach the ground). She doesn’t think the woman’s murder is related to the spying, but she does think an earlier death in the same park, ruled accidental by Reddy, was murder – and by the same killer. Meanwhile, she has to contend with Reddy’s cronies making her job difficult, her sister and Marino staying with her (although they don’t bicker as much as they do in the TV adaptation), and Lucy’s grief.
Then Reddy fires her. And a man tries to break into her house…
Everything is wrapped up in a couple of pages of epilogue. Scarpetta gets her job back. Lucy kills the intruder, who turns out to be an odd-job man Scarpetta had used several times. He also murdered the two women, and had been a serial rapist for years. WTF. “By the way, here’s how the story ended” is a piss-poor way to finish a novel.
Given the changes to Scarpetta’s situation, I have to wonder if the novel was written with the TV series in mind – ie, Marino’s marriage, Lucy’s loss. were added to the book because the TV adaptation needed them to create home drama. Scarpetta’s move back to her old job as Chief Medical Examiner in Virginia was because in the narrative set in the past, and based on the first Scarpetta novel, Postmortem, she held that position – and so was dictated by the structure of the TV series. The book was published in 2021, and the series was greenlit that same year, so it’s certainly possible.
Despite all of the above, the strangest thing about the book is that it appears to have been written by AI. Things were different back in 2021, but GPT-3 had been around for a year, and while less sophisticated than current LLMs, it’s not inconceivable Cornwell could have used it. It would certainly explain the bizarre writing. Cornwell is hardly a prose stylist, but in Autopsy the writing is actually terrible. Sentences have weird hanging adverbial clauses. Dependent clauses lack verbs. The relative pronoun “which” is conspicuous by its absence, especially in sentences which would be grammatically correct if it had been used. The same bizarre syntax also appears occasionally in dialogue, in actual speech spoken by characters. And, most bafflingly, the swearwords have all been bowdlerised – eg, “effing”, “cluster-eff”, “flipping”. The bowdlerisation is even annotated:
“They can screw themselves.” Only Marino doesn’t say screw. (p 272)
WTAF.
The last few Scarpetta novels have been frustrating reads, chiefly because plot reasons require Scarpetta, and hence the reader, be kept in dark for much of the book. But I quite liked the microscopic focus on the lead character in Chaos. Autopsy, on the other hand, is easily one of the worst books in the series so far, if not the actual worst. Appallingly written, poorly plotted, and with changes to Scarpetta’s family life that make no sense, unless introduced with the TV series in mind (and even then baffling). I hope the remaining four novels in the series are not the same. show less
Now I have. The most obvious changes in the TV series were: Pete Marino is married to Scarpetta’s sister, Dorothy, and niece Lucy’s wife and adopted son are both dead. None of which was the case in the preceding book, Chaos.
However, Marino is indeed married to Dorothy in Autopsy, which appeared five years after Chaos and, more pertinently, after the pandemic. Lucy’s family apparently died of covid while living in London (Cornwell outright lies here and implies the UK fatalities were much greater than those of the US; in fact, far more people, and more people per capita, died in the US). The romance between Marino and Dorothy was hinted at in Chaos, and before that in Flesh and Blood and Depraved Heart, but there is no good reason I could discern why Janet and Desi should be killed off. (Or for Janet’s change of nationality to British, when in the books she is ex-FBI and first met Lucy at Quantico.)
So, it seems the TV adaptation is mostly quite faithful (and yes, an AI Janet does feature in the novel). In terms of plot… Autopsy opens with Scarpetta back in Virginia and once again the Commonwealth Chief Medical Examiner, taking over from the incompetent and manipulative Elvin Reddy, who is apparently an old adversary of Scarpetta’s, although he wasn’t mentioned in earlier novels (as far as I remember). She is called to the house of a young woman who has disappeared, and who might be the victim in an ongoing murder investigation. A body was discovered beside some railway tracks in a park, and its hands had been removed. They quickly confirm the missing woman is the murder victim. She worked for a laboratory researching 3D-printed organs, and they discover she was a spy – corporate espionage, or for the Russians, they don’t know. She has an accomplice, who is aboard an orbiting laboratory operated by the same company. Except he’s gone rogue, murdered the other two astronauts, and fled in the Soyuz spacecraft.
Scarpetta is asked to help understand what happened in the orbital laboratory (it doesn’t crash on Earth, as it does in the TV series, because, well, things falling from orbit rarely reach the ground). She doesn’t think the woman’s murder is related to the spying, but she does think an earlier death in the same park, ruled accidental by Reddy, was murder – and by the same killer. Meanwhile, she has to contend with Reddy’s cronies making her job difficult, her sister and Marino staying with her (although they don’t bicker as much as they do in the TV adaptation), and Lucy’s grief.
Then Reddy fires her. And a man tries to break into her house…
Everything is wrapped up in a couple of pages of epilogue. Scarpetta gets her job back. Lucy kills the intruder, who turns out to be an odd-job man Scarpetta had used several times. He also murdered the two women, and had been a serial rapist for years. WTF. “By the way, here’s how the story ended” is a piss-poor way to finish a novel.
Given the changes to Scarpetta’s situation, I have to wonder if the novel was written with the TV series in mind – ie, Marino’s marriage, Lucy’s loss. were added to the book because the TV adaptation needed them to create home drama. Scarpetta’s move back to her old job as Chief Medical Examiner in Virginia was because in the narrative set in the past, and based on the first Scarpetta novel, Postmortem, she held that position – and so was dictated by the structure of the TV series. The book was published in 2021, and the series was greenlit that same year, so it’s certainly possible.
Despite all of the above, the strangest thing about the book is that it appears to have been written by AI. Things were different back in 2021, but GPT-3 had been around for a year, and while less sophisticated than current LLMs, it’s not inconceivable Cornwell could have used it. It would certainly explain the bizarre writing. Cornwell is hardly a prose stylist, but in Autopsy the writing is actually terrible. Sentences have weird hanging adverbial clauses. Dependent clauses lack verbs. The relative pronoun “which” is conspicuous by its absence, especially in sentences which would be grammatically correct if it had been used. The same bizarre syntax also appears occasionally in dialogue, in actual speech spoken by characters. And, most bafflingly, the swearwords have all been bowdlerised – eg, “effing”, “cluster-eff”, “flipping”. The bowdlerisation is even annotated:
“They can screw themselves.” Only Marino doesn’t say screw. (p 272)
WTAF.
The last few Scarpetta novels have been frustrating reads, chiefly because plot reasons require Scarpetta, and hence the reader, be kept in dark for much of the book. But I quite liked the microscopic focus on the lead character in Chaos. Autopsy, on the other hand, is easily one of the worst books in the series so far, if not the actual worst. Appallingly written, poorly plotted, and with changes to Scarpetta’s family life that make no sense, unless introduced with the TV series in mind (and even then baffling). I hope the remaining four novels in the series are not the same. show less
I sometimes think that Patricia Cornwell lives in an alternate electronic universe. Her references to the web, to email, to some social networking sites have often used wrong terms or wrong technology. I suspect her editors either are in that world with her or they don’t want to rock the boat with a note explaining why her take is off.
In this present novel one of the issues is with Marino (isn’t it always?). Apparently he now uses Twitter. And he met someone through his tweets. And the show more two of them “tweeted” each other.
Here’s the thing. Twitter is primarily a public forum. You can restrict your tweets to a set group of persons whom you approve. But it isn’t an instant message service. There are far easier ways to have a conversation online or on your phone. My suspicion is that Cornwell doesn’t really get Twitter. Not so unusual, really, as many of us find it peculiar. But if you are going to include it in your novel you should get to know it very well.
As for the forensics, Cornwell doesn't skimp on that. She does the research, and that is one of the primary reasons I read her books from time to time. In this case, Scarpetta is called to pull a body from the sea, a mummified body that is tied to weights at the bottom and to floating items at the top. She is also tied, accidentally, to a giant sea turtle. When Scarpetta sees how it looks underwater she realizes it will take some care to bring the body to the boat in one piece.
But this isn't the only body. There is a presumed death in Canada, of a paleontologist, another woman in her fifties, as is the body in the sea. Then there is the disappearance of a prominent industrialist's wife, a take-charge woman of a similar age.
When the mummified body is identified, there are disturbing connections discovered as well. Marino, Scarpetta's chief investigator and long-time friend, had been "tweeting" a woman who was supposedly the dead woman. An FBI investigator, a woman who goes by the unlikely name of Douglas, is obsessed with this connection as well as with Scarpetta's husband Benton. Her obsession borders on the dangerous.
As is typical with Scarpetta novels, complications abound and small details in forensic examinations lead to the killer. As is typical with these novels, Scarpetta has reason to worry about her own safety.
The plots are unlikely but well-designed. Clearly Cornwell is a detail person, and I suspect she is in many ways similar to her main character, Kay Scarpetta. If so, I do not think I would like her. I don't like Scarpetta. While Marino is supposed to be her friend and she cuts him breaks when he behaves badly, her thoughts are often of disgust where a friend, I'd think, would be more compassionate. I'd think there would be more genuine warmth. I don't detect that, actually, between Scarpetta and anyone else. Her conversations with Benton are loaded with suspicions and worries. The romantic and warm segments read to me as half-baked.
So there you are. I don't like Scarpetta, I get irritated at her, yet I read these novels. I like the science, I like Lucy (Scarpetta's niece), I like that these are absorbing tales, not easy to put down. show less
In this present novel one of the issues is with Marino (isn’t it always?). Apparently he now uses Twitter. And he met someone through his tweets. And the show more two of them “tweeted” each other.
Here’s the thing. Twitter is primarily a public forum. You can restrict your tweets to a set group of persons whom you approve. But it isn’t an instant message service. There are far easier ways to have a conversation online or on your phone. My suspicion is that Cornwell doesn’t really get Twitter. Not so unusual, really, as many of us find it peculiar. But if you are going to include it in your novel you should get to know it very well.
As for the forensics, Cornwell doesn't skimp on that. She does the research, and that is one of the primary reasons I read her books from time to time. In this case, Scarpetta is called to pull a body from the sea, a mummified body that is tied to weights at the bottom and to floating items at the top. She is also tied, accidentally, to a giant sea turtle. When Scarpetta sees how it looks underwater she realizes it will take some care to bring the body to the boat in one piece.
But this isn't the only body. There is a presumed death in Canada, of a paleontologist, another woman in her fifties, as is the body in the sea. Then there is the disappearance of a prominent industrialist's wife, a take-charge woman of a similar age.
When the mummified body is identified, there are disturbing connections discovered as well. Marino, Scarpetta's chief investigator and long-time friend, had been "tweeting" a woman who was supposedly the dead woman. An FBI investigator, a woman who goes by the unlikely name of Douglas, is obsessed with this connection as well as with Scarpetta's husband Benton. Her obsession borders on the dangerous.
As is typical with Scarpetta novels, complications abound and small details in forensic examinations lead to the killer. As is typical with these novels, Scarpetta has reason to worry about her own safety.
The plots are unlikely but well-designed. Clearly Cornwell is a detail person, and I suspect she is in many ways similar to her main character, Kay Scarpetta. If so, I do not think I would like her. I don't like Scarpetta. While Marino is supposed to be her friend and she cuts him breaks when he behaves badly, her thoughts are often of disgust where a friend, I'd think, would be more compassionate. I'd think there would be more genuine warmth. I don't detect that, actually, between Scarpetta and anyone else. Her conversations with Benton are loaded with suspicions and worries. The romantic and warm segments read to me as half-baked.
So there you are. I don't like Scarpetta, I get irritated at her, yet I read these novels. I like the science, I like Lucy (Scarpetta's niece), I like that these are absorbing tales, not easy to put down. show less
Food and friendship go together in Patricia Cornwell's book Scarpetta's Winter Table. In this story, we see Scarpetta with her friends and family as they come together for Christmas, but the events unfold in the context of food. We get into Scarpetta's head, for example, as she prepares a meal for her coworker and her niece. In another chapter, animosity disappears as a troubled child and a curmudgeony police officer bond over homemade chili. I've never another book that took this approach, show more and I think it's a fine idea, and well used here.
That said, I didn't really care for this book. For all its well-crafted prose and unique premise, I didn't like the main character, Kay Scarpetta, and it's very difficult to like a book when you don't like the main character. I understand that this book is part of a series, and I have never read the other books; I am sure that those books shed more light on Scarpetta's personality. Certainly many other people reading this book will begin it with a clear picture of her already in mind, and I'm sure that helps their enjoyment of this story. It may be that this book only doesn't function as a standalone.
But since this book is my only impression of Scarpetta, I don't really have anything else to go by. The result is a main character who comes off as cold, distant, fussy, judgmental, and vaguely hypocritical. In the first chapter, for example, when she is preparing food for two close friends, she doesn't seem happy, or even sad. She doesn't seem like she feels anything: neither pleasure (nor even annoyance) at the work she does preparing the food, not enjoyment when she eats it. She isn't even all that warm to her guests. She's very particularly about the way she makes the food, and she only uses high-quality ingredients, but she never seems to have a sense of pride in food well prepared. It was like she was just going through the motions.
In a different chapter, Scarpetta tries to convince her niece to come with her to visit the rest of the family. She tells Lucy that it's a good thing to do, that she might someday regret not coming. But after making such a big deal about the importance of family and holiday get-togethers, Scarpetta is irritable and rude to her mother. She gets very angry at her mother over something really trivial, and then she almost seems to blame her mother for putting her in a bad mood. She has good health habits (which is great), but she seems to look down on, even judge, her family for not being healthy. She inflicts her own dietary tastes onto them, going shopping by herself, buying only what she wants, even ignoring her mother's specific request for certain items. She's a guest, for the love of Pete. Who died and made her supreme dictator? And what really gets me is the borderline-hypocrisy of it all. After making such a big deal about family, she treats her own mother coldly. When congratulating herself on a healthy lifestyle, she conveniently forgets that she drinks a lot. She pours wine for herself, and the rest of the bottle goes into the soup. Then she gets another bottle, pours more for herself, more for the soup. The soup is specifically designed to use whatever ingredients are available, but Scarpetta's soup MUST have wine. I've no idea why. I have heard of some dishes that called for wine, but none of them was soup. And don't get me started on her well-stocked house. Or her friend, whom she invited to bring the spiked eggnog. I mean, I give her credit for not driving after so much alcohol consupmtion, and she doesn't let her guests drive either. But then, later on, to play the I'm-health-conscious-and-you're-not card? She was way out of line.
This book was very enjoyable in places, and it certainly had some very sweet moments. But my favorite chapters in the book were the ones without Scarpetta, and that makes me sad. show less
That said, I didn't really care for this book. For all its well-crafted prose and unique premise, I didn't like the main character, Kay Scarpetta, and it's very difficult to like a book when you don't like the main character. I understand that this book is part of a series, and I have never read the other books; I am sure that those books shed more light on Scarpetta's personality. Certainly many other people reading this book will begin it with a clear picture of her already in mind, and I'm sure that helps their enjoyment of this story. It may be that this book only doesn't function as a standalone.
But since this book is my only impression of Scarpetta, I don't really have anything else to go by. The result is a main character who comes off as cold, distant, fussy, judgmental, and vaguely hypocritical. In the first chapter, for example, when she is preparing food for two close friends, she doesn't seem happy, or even sad. She doesn't seem like she feels anything: neither pleasure (nor even annoyance) at the work she does preparing the food, not enjoyment when she eats it. She isn't even all that warm to her guests. She's very particularly about the way she makes the food, and she only uses high-quality ingredients, but she never seems to have a sense of pride in food well prepared. It was like she was just going through the motions.
In a different chapter, Scarpetta tries to convince her niece to come with her to visit the rest of the family. She tells Lucy that it's a good thing to do, that she might someday regret not coming. But after making such a big deal about the importance of family and holiday get-togethers, Scarpetta is irritable and rude to her mother. She gets very angry at her mother over something really trivial, and then she almost seems to blame her mother for putting her in a bad mood. She has good health habits (which is great), but she seems to look down on, even judge, her family for not being healthy. She inflicts her own dietary tastes onto them, going shopping by herself, buying only what she wants, even ignoring her mother's specific request for certain items. She's a guest, for the love of Pete. Who died and made her supreme dictator? And what really gets me is the borderline-hypocrisy of it all. After making such a big deal about family, she treats her own mother coldly. When congratulating herself on a healthy lifestyle, she conveniently forgets that she drinks a lot. She pours wine for herself, and the rest of the bottle goes into the soup. Then she gets another bottle, pours more for herself, more for the soup. The soup is specifically designed to use whatever ingredients are available, but Scarpetta's soup MUST have wine. I've no idea why. I have heard of some dishes that called for wine, but none of them was soup. And don't get me started on her well-stocked house. Or her friend, whom she invited to bring the spiked eggnog. I mean, I give her credit for not driving after so much alcohol consupmtion, and she doesn't let her guests drive either. But then, later on, to play the I'm-health-conscious-and-you're-not card? She was way out of line.
This book was very enjoyable in places, and it certainly had some very sweet moments. But my favorite chapters in the book were the ones without Scarpetta, and that makes me sad. show less
Benton, Scarpetta’s husband, a FBI profiler, is away working on three linked murders of women in Washington DC, but his expertise is being ignored, disparaged even. And then the body of a murdered woman appears in Cambridge (Massachusetts, that is), Scarpetta’s jurisdiction, and it’s clear it’s connected to the three in Washington, even if it seems to contradict the prevailing theory held by the FBI about the crimes.
Scarpetta, Benton, Lucy and Marino find themselves trying to show more identify a serial killer who, it seems, is being protected by someone powerful, at least to the extent the FBI agent in charge of the investigation is ignoring evidence and focusing instead on a teenager who disappeared seventeen years before.
Once again, Scarpetta’s reputation is under attack, as are her family and relationships, but this time she sets out to methodically prove every point of her - and Benton’s - theory of the crimes, and so bring down the FBI agent deliberately misleading everyone. As in other books in the series, the murderer is more than human, almost as if the nearest the US can get to real-life superheroes are serial killers, which is pretty damn sick no matter which way you look at it. It might even be said crime novels which focus on serial killer stories - as so many of the Scarpetta series have - have much in common with fantasy or science fiction. True, one of the reasons I like the Scarpetta series is because Cornwell details the forensic science used - which does occasionally read like science fiction (much like the many CSI TV series).
Another draw is Cornwell’s focus on characterisation. Her cast are not enigmatic, phlegmatic, whimsical or just sketched-in, as is usually the case in crime fiction. She started out using first-person narratives, then switched to third-person omniscient before moving back again to first-person, except now there’s far more interiority and Scarpetta’s every thought is worked through implacably.
Dust is one of the better books in the series, even though the plot centres around an implausible serial killer, and a defining event occurs off-stage and is far too easy to be credible. There’s also a fascinating article about Cornwell after the novel in the ebook edition, highlighting the many parallels between Cornwell herself and her characters, especially Scarpetta and Lucy. show less
Scarpetta, Benton, Lucy and Marino find themselves trying to show more identify a serial killer who, it seems, is being protected by someone powerful, at least to the extent the FBI agent in charge of the investigation is ignoring evidence and focusing instead on a teenager who disappeared seventeen years before.
Once again, Scarpetta’s reputation is under attack, as are her family and relationships, but this time she sets out to methodically prove every point of her - and Benton’s - theory of the crimes, and so bring down the FBI agent deliberately misleading everyone. As in other books in the series, the murderer is more than human, almost as if the nearest the US can get to real-life superheroes are serial killers, which is pretty damn sick no matter which way you look at it. It might even be said crime novels which focus on serial killer stories - as so many of the Scarpetta series have - have much in common with fantasy or science fiction. True, one of the reasons I like the Scarpetta series is because Cornwell details the forensic science used - which does occasionally read like science fiction (much like the many CSI TV series).
Another draw is Cornwell’s focus on characterisation. Her cast are not enigmatic, phlegmatic, whimsical or just sketched-in, as is usually the case in crime fiction. She started out using first-person narratives, then switched to third-person omniscient before moving back again to first-person, except now there’s far more interiority and Scarpetta’s every thought is worked through implacably.
Dust is one of the better books in the series, even though the plot centres around an implausible serial killer, and a defining event occurs off-stage and is far too easy to be credible. There’s also a fascinating article about Cornwell after the novel in the ebook edition, highlighting the many parallels between Cornwell herself and her characters, especially Scarpetta and Lucy. show less
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Books About Murder (17)
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Female Author (5)
Jarett's Books (4)
Florida (3)
Read in 2014 (2)
Edgar Award (1)
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Statistics
- Works
- 198
- Also by
- 14
- Members
- 136,631
- Popularity
- #50
- Rating
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- Reviews
- 1,782
- ISBNs
- 2,931
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- 31
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