The Front

It's an affront.

This was the closest I have come to giving up on a book since Satanic Verses. The non-dialogue is truncated in the style of a film script and makes for difficult reading. There are five main characters but none of them satisfy. The plot trips over itself with several improbable threads that don't come together or follow through, culminating in an implausible ending out of the blue. This book looks like a rush job by Cornwell. I need to revisit other of her work to understand her popularity.

I have given up on Patricia Cornwall's, Kay Scarpetta series awhile ago because I just didn't find them exciting any more, and they all seemed rushed and contrived. I did read her Win Garano book At Risk when it came out and I rather enjoyed it and the new characters. So I was looking forward to this one. I was disappointed. The book was rushed and not believable to me. I didn't find that the book kept my interest quite frankly. Maybe the books are just too short and there is no time to really develop a plot. I'm not sure, but I am officially done with this author. Sorry Patricia.

I used to be a huge fan of Cornwell’s Scarpetta books but some years ago found they had become bogged down in unnecessary length and the plots were increasingly convoluted and ridiculous. I eventually gave up all together after Trace in 2004. Since then I have, very occasionally, wondered whether I am missing out on anything by forsaking all things Cornwell so when I noticed The Front, the second of a series featuring Massachusetts State Police investigator Win Garano, was short (under 5 hours or less than 200 pages in the print version) and on special at iTunes I took the opportunity to check it out.

Monique Lamont is a District Attorney with greater political ambitions and as part of her long term publicity strategy she orders Win show more Garano, a special investigator assigned to her office, to re-open a 40 year old case in which a young English woman living in Boston was murdered. Lamont seems to think they can tie the murder in to the infamous Boston Strangler case and Garano is both skeptical and reluctant to have anything to do with the investigation. He is supposed to be helped by a female cop nick-named Stump (which we discover has nothing to do with the fact she has a prosthetic leg) but she is occupied by other things including investigating a series of robberies.

The book is better than that last Scarpetta I read in that the story moves at a faster pace and is a more manageable length. But it reads more like the treatment for a new, not very good, TV series than a novel. There’s little depth to the characters and they all felt like stereotypes to me (the ice maiden female, her disgruntled, smarter underling, the feisty disabled woman, the hippy grandmother…). There’s lots of dialogue but most of it is the kind of unrealistic psycho babble that no two humans would ever actually engage in.

The real downfall though is the plot. After meandering down some not terribly interesting alleys (maybe someone could make the theft of copper from building sites interesting but Cornwell couldn’t) the protagonist makes a huge leap of logic and the whole thing is wrapped up neatly. Except for the Scotland Yard connection: I still don’t know what that was about and I even re-played the last hour to make sure I hadn’t been daydreaming. Even though the book is short Cornwell manages to find room for a swag of irrelevant subjects including terrorism, the mafia, JFK’s Presidency and the aforementioned Scotland Yard. I hope Apple paid her for the numerous mentions of their famous phone because the gratuitous product placement didn’t help the book in any way. No one I know mentions the brand of their phone every time they check the thing for messages.

I can’t say I was disappointed by the book because I didn’t set out with tremendously high expectations. Perhaps that’s an unfair way to head into a book but this is the woman who revived a favoured character from the dead in the silliest plot device I’ve ever had the misfortune to read. Given that I didn’t pay much for it and it didn’t occupy a lot of my time I guess I’m happy to know for sure that I’m missing nothing by reading other authors in preference to Cornwell.

Audibook specific comments: I thought the narrator did a good job given the book was so dialogue-heavy and there were a lot of characters but as an Aussie I didn’t notice what was, according to other reviewers, a less than stellar Boston accent. show less

This outline of a novel is exactly the reason I no longer buy Patricia Cornwell books, even in paperback. At 188 pages of large type on wide margined pages, it is barely a story, much less a novel. It is supposed to be the complex tale of of a ambitious prosecutor, her downtrodden detective of the Massachusetts State Police and a long cold case. But the characters are cardboard. The plot is nonexistent and the subplots start and trail into nothingness. Why involve Scotland Yard? Because she had a neat idea to set a scene in the Dorchester Hotel? Why involve copper theft? Because it was a hot topic? It certainly doesn't have anything to do with the actual plot. This book is nothing more than the waste of an hour or so of your time.

The author depends too much on her readers having read the first in her series to understand, this, the second. To be expected of an author who truly develops characters, but I felt I had to keep catching up in this story of a state police officer and a district attorney caught up in a web of crime and surveillance.

It's been a while since I've read anything from Patricia Cornwell, and, I have to say, this book was somewhat surprising.

For instance, I was halfway through the book and was still trying to discern the plot of the book. The story unfolded slowly, allowing the reader to familiarize him- or herself with the characters, and it was done so smoothly and was so well paced, you found yourself turning the pages quickly to see where everything was headed.

The Front centers around an old, unsolved murder of a young woman. An ambitious D.A., Monique Lamont, has her own agenda when she assigns Win Garano, a state investigator, to the case. What are her reasons for digging up this case? Win is not too thrilled to be pulled into it, especially when he show more finds that he will be working the case with Stump, a Watertown detective.

A quick read. At the end, though, I was found wanting more. It was well written, I really liked the characters, and I could have kept reading for another 100 or 200 pages. show less

I only got this because it was in the bargain bin. I really should have saved my $5.

This is an extremely small book (about 180+ pages) and contain none of Cornwell's characters that I normally care about. The plot was awful, the characters were awful and made me want to punch them. In short, DO NOT READ THIS BOOK.