This is the 15th Kay Scarpetta forensic mystery, so if you know anyone who has read the other 14, you probably cannot go wrong giving this to them for Christmas. I bought the first one, Postmortem, all those years ago and have been hooked ever since on Kay Scarpetta and her science-y way of finding baddies and solving murders.
When you think about how popular forensics have become in the entertainment world (think TV’s CSI), then you realise Patricia Cornwell was actually a little ahead of her time. And to be perfectly honest, I’m not really any longer totally focussed on the particular mysteries she writes about.
This time, there’s a killer on the loose and it’s a matter of having to sort out how the dead people are all linked and who is behind them. Plus, Scarpetta’s faithful fat pig of an assistant, Pete oarino, has gone psycho and looks like doing more damage to the forensic pathologist than anyone else.
But by book 15, I find myself more interested in Scarpetta herself and frankly I think it’s time Patricia Cornwell skipped the murder and mayhem and allowed Scarpetta to let her hair down a little and spend more than five minutes with the sexy Benton Wesley, her supposed amour. The thing is, we’ve been with the doc for all this time and we want her to have a life outside the morgue. Maybe Cornwell is preparing us for this, as Scarpetta actually cracks a joke on page 310. Then again, maybe she isn’t, and it probably doesn’t matter as the fans will lap it up, no matter what.
I’ll be there with them buying book number 16. That doesn’t mean I can’t suggest that she needs to re-think some of the characters’ names though. This is serious death and destruction, so she could do better than naming a biker’s moll Shandy Snook and a hearse driver Lucious oeddick.
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