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Books : Fiction : Authors, A-Z : C : Cornwell, Patricia
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The postmortem is in--Black Notice, the 10th in Patricia Cornwell's Scarpetta series--is a gore- splattered, intensely exciting read.As winter grips Richmond, Virginia, an air of sombreness pervades chief medical examiner Kay Scarpetta's world. Her beloved niece Lucy is involved in a dangerous undercover police operation in Miami, and auntie fears for her life. A tyrannical new deputy chief, Diane Bray, wants to get Kay's department under her jurisdiction. Meanwhile, back at the office, someone has tinkered with the e-mail system, stealing Kay's identity and sending off slanderous and hurtful messages. Emotionally battered, Scarpetta fears she is going insane. Or, could it be that someone is deliberately sowing this harvest of sorrow?
Despite her personal problems, Scarpetta is still the reigning diva at the department of death. She is sent to investigate the purified remains of a man found inside a container ship, "eyes bulged froglike, and the scalp and beard were sloughing off with the outer layer of darkening skin." Kay finds strange, animal-like hairs on the man's clothing--the same hairs that she discovers on a murdered store clerk a few days later. In actuality, the bizarre killings extend well beyond Virginia; whoever killed the Richmond victims also butchered people in France. Kay and police captain Pete Marino are whisked off to Paris where they must collect top-secret information from a Paris morgue, and avoid becoming victims themselves.
This macabre tome is the stuff that classic Scarpetta tales are made of: creepy but compulsive autopsy scenes, plentiful plot twists and the compelling, if slightly more vulnerable, chief medical examiner herself. --Naomi Gesinger
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What is peculiarly impressive about Patricia Cornwell's new addition to her popular series about the pathologist Kay Scarpetta, The Last Precinct, is that it is a book in which everything is up for grabs and all is at stake. Murders we thought settled for good in previous books, with guilt allocated and people arrested or killed, suddenly come bubbling to the surface again. Kay finds herself accused of the killing of difficult Deputy Police Chief Diane Bray, and of framing the deformed psychopath who killed Diane and burst into Kay's home with murderous intent. Even the hideous death of Kay's lover Benton, several books ago, turns out to have been more complicated than we thought. Kay finds herself in jeopardy several times over with her headstrong lesbian niece, her only entirely reliable ally. This is a book in which Cornwell takes her heroine into new areas--we get the same amount of complicated forensic lore, but there is a new personal urgency to it, a sense that detection is not a game. Kay's relationships with colleagues have always been prickly, but here they become more problematic than ever before; Cornwell's admirers will be pleased by this, her most tense and nervy book for years. --Roz Kaveney This review refers to the hardcover edition of this title.
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When your everyday life is filled with death it's easy to find yourself a little edgy. The audio version of Patricia Cornwell's Point of Origin gives fans of her familiar heroine, Dr Kay Scarpetta, a little something extra, a chance to hear the deep hurt and burning cynicism of the chief medical examiner's biting words. "You don't put your hands inside their ruined bodies and touch and measure their wounds .... You see clean case files and glossy photos and cold crime scenes. You spend more time with the killers than with those they ripped from life. And maybe you sleep better than I do, too. Maybe you still dream because you aren't afraid to."Perhaps because Kate Reading has also narrated Cornwell's Unnatural Exposure and Cause of Death, her voice conveys experience and the history of what has come before, allowing listeners to hear between the lines. Using a subtle but effective range of vocal inflections, Reading lifts the characters off the page and carries them along as the plot spins ever faster, tangling Scarpetta in a snarl of arson, deceit and psychopathic murder. With her nemesis making threats and suspicious fires leaving calcified corpses, Dr. Scarpetta's long-overdue romantic getaway has gone up in smoke. It's just one more day at the morgue and Point of Origin, another hit in the popular series of Scarpetta mysteries, finds the good doctor's attitude honed to a razor sharp point.--George Laney
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Break out the champagne: Patricia Cornwell has thankfully moved on from her controversial campaign to lay the Jack the Ripper murders at the door of the painter Walter Sickert, and in Trace is again raising our pulse rate by taking us into the dangerous world of consultant pathologist Dr Kay Scarpetta.In this latest outing, Kay finds herself back in Virginia examining a curious death, that of the youthful Gilly Paulson. Joel Marcus, her successor as Chief Medical Examiner, has summoned a reluctant Scarpetta to help out, but her professional work is compromised by her unhappiness at the radical changes occurring in her old territory: Scarpetta's old morgue has been bulldozed, and she isn't happy working with the man who took her job. Other members of the familiar Scarpetta crew make an appearance: her partner Benton Wesley and her niece Lucy Farinelli are tracking down an assailant who has nearly ended the life of one of Lucy's colleagues. The two cases turn out to be connected (surprise!), and soon several lives are at stake.
After the recent misfires, it's a relief to note that Patricia Cornwell is back on track, dealing comfortably with her most familiar protagonist and a plot that yokes in bomb-makers and some bizarre sexual practices. A resounding welcome back, to both Ms Cornwell and Ms Scarpetta.--Barry Forshaw
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Another Patricia Cornwell appears, and it's a pretty safe bet that At Risk will storm its way to the top of the best-selling charts. Cornwell has been at the top of the American crime writing tree for so long now that her position is virtually unassailable--even when she produces the odd misfire (which he has been known to do). Fortunately, At Risk can be counted among her successes, though its brevity may disappoint some.The book is based on a recent story of the same name serialised in The New York Times, but those hoping for the return of Cornwell's resourceful forensic specialist Dr Kay Scarpetta will have to wait a little longer, as Cornwell introduces a new central character in this book. Having inhabited the mind of a female protagonist for so long, the author has felt the need to move into very different territory with a charismatic male police investigator at the centre of the narrative. The book takes the reader from the cool climes of Cambridge, Massachusetts to the overbearing heat of Knoxville Tennessee. Win Garano is handed a tricky assignment: he is to investigate a murder case that is over two decades old. District Attorney Monique Lamont isn't concerned about the difficulties of the case, though--she simply wants results for personal reasons. Win is convinced that he has been saddled with a very low priority case, but quickly finds that there is much more to this twenty-year-old mystery than he thought. As some very dangerous secrets are uncovered, Win finds himself dealing with both the consequences of his investigation and the remarkable ambitiousness of Monique Lamont as he pursues a political grand prize. In the past, when Cornwell has moved away from the safe territory of the Kay Scarpetta novels, she has slightly alienated her dedicated fan base. But she is absolutely right to take chances like this in order to freshen her literary inspiration, and this fast-moving piece is a laudable effort, even if it comes in at a rather shortish page count. --Barry Forshaw
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