Product Description

Investigating the disappearance of two sisters in Florida, Dr. Kay Scarpetta follows clues that twist and turn, leading her into the psychopathic depths of a jailed serial killer's mind.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #30185 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 464 pages

From Publishers Weekly
It's not often a crime novel offers such a smorgasbord of oddball elements, including autopsy advice, methods of combating tree blight, the use of spiders in sadomasochist torture and couples covering the sexual and psychological waterfronts. There's even a little nasty fun at the expense of television psychoanalysts. With geographic locations switching slightly faster than the speed of sound, it's to Reading's credit that she smoothes out the ultra rumpled excesses of Cornwell's mind-boggling plot and takes full advantage of the yarn's narrator-friendly present tense. Having given voice to several earlier books in the series, she's got the main characters down cold. Her Dr. Kay Scarpetta is all snarky professional reserve and personal insecurity. Self-loathing lesbian niece Lucy, sounds properly troublesome and troubled, with an added catch in the throat due to a secret she's keeping. Pete Marino, the bullet-headed, gym rat security chief of the Lucy-originated National Forensic Academy, sounds so gruff and aggressive, he should be kept on a chain leash. And Scarpetta's inamorato, Benton Wesley, whose study of mass murderers' brain patterns gives the novel its title, is, as his name suggests, the very model of a dry, annoyingly passive-aggressive personality. The joke here-intended or not-is that the novel's protagonists are almost as mentally or emotionally disturbed as its homicidal villains. Cornwell seems to have grown weary of the lot of them. But there's still a flicker of life left and Reading has the skill to make the most of it.
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About the Author
Patricia Cornwell's most recent number-one bestsellers include Trace, Blow Fly, and Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper-Case Closed. Her earlier work includes Postmortem-the only novel to win the Edgar, Creasey, Anthony, and Macavity awards and the French Prix du Roman d'Aventure in a single year-and Cruel and Unusual, which won Great Britain's prestigious Gold Dagger Award for the year's best crime novel of 1993. Her fictional chief medical examiner, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, won the 1999 Sherlock Award for best detective created by an American author.

From AudioFile
Kay Scarpetta, renowned criminal investigator with the National Forensic Academy in Florida, hunts another serial murderer. Basil Jenrette, imprisoned serial killer and research subject, is somehow connected. Kate Reading's narration is good; she is particularly adept at depicting the therapist's calm, controlled voice, then switching to the anger and belligerence of Moreno, former city cop. Scarpetta fans may be disappointed that her focus in this novel is forensics of the dysfunctional , rather than murder and investigative work, and that the story's ending is illogical. Some parts of the story are overly gruesome, as well. Even excellent narration and characterization can't salvage this poorly plotted mystery. One expects better from Cornwell. G.D.W. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Customer Reviews

Very Disappointing
I've been reading Patricia Cornwell's Scarpetta novels on and off for some time now. There was a time when these stories were innovative, and even groundbreaking in their introduction of the strong female lead into the serial killer, suspense genre. But something happened along the way. I don't know if Cornwell changed her story lines for her own reasons or due to bad advice, but rather than forensic suspense the stories turned into adventures in dysfunctional families. Scarpetta became a flaming codependent trying to mother Lucy, whose goal in life was staying in trouble. And Pete Marino, never the most likeable of characters became increasingly large, loud and obnoxious. To put it bluntly, the killers were often the most attractive characters in the stories.

Cornwell long ago fell off my 'buy in hardback' list. But when I picked up Predator the blurb sounded pretty good, and I decided to give Cornwell another try. The story finds Kay Scarpetta, Pete Marino, and a whole cast of crimestoppers working at the National Forensic Academy, the institute Lucy created so that she could work as a free agent. All isn't well at the Academy, strange events and thefts are interspersed with intense personality conflicts and mistrust until it is obvious that a crisis is brewing.

In the meantime a subtle series of deaths and disappearances come to light that seem to link Basil Jenrette, an imprisoned serial killer who has become the subject of Benton Wesley's research into the deviant mind, with killers down in Florida where the academy is. The connections surface painstakingly slowly after in depth forensic work. This is the formula which made Cornwell a success, and I hoped for a return to the Scarpetta of the early stories.

Unfortunately, that was not to be. Most of the suspense is about which character will have an argument with another, not with the forensic work. Kay Scarpetta literally shotguns the research work, creating a haphazard web of clues and red herrings. If it wasn't for Pat Cornwell's determination to give the whole story away by continually inviting the reader into the mind of the killer (and a very boring killer he is, by the way) the plot would have been almost impossible to follow. It is almost as if Cornwell wrote a bunch of short episodes and then put them in a semblance of order without any effort at continuity. I'll probably never know whether the ending was intended to be a cliff hanger or if the story was abandoned to its loose ends.

It's a shame that this series has been allowed to degenerate the way it has. Cornwell seems to be convinced that if she cannot breath new life into her characters she can succeed by making them so pitiable that the reader will succumb to guilt and read the yet another book. My recommendation is that, under no circumstances buy the hardback. Wait for the paperback if you will, although you may find the time best spent reading something else.

not a good effort
Any Cornwell work is better than some other books, but...
I have NEVER liked the way Marino has been handled in the entire series - now he is like a caricature- before he was street wise liasion to Scarpetta, then he blew up to a large smoking drinking person who had health problems, and now he is aloof big muscle bound biker guy who is at odds with Scarpetta and knows something funny is going on with the misinformation -
The series and this novel does not have the BITE it did - if you would reread the first books that made a wave in the thriller genre you will understand what I mean.
We've gone through a lot with the regulars of this series - they have not progressed in the way the folks who pay hardback prices would like. Not so sure I will pay hardback prices again for this series again. and that's sad.

No sign of improvement
I remember loving the early Scarpetta books. Flanked by an array of interesting characters, she was definitely front and center in every story (as was proven by the fact that the books were written in the first person). She was a capable medical examiner, but also a skilled cook (Cornwell's delicious descriptions of Kay's Italian recipes in her gourmet kitchen were so vivid, you could almost smell the food), and a woman with a sense of humor. She and her sidekicks (Marino, Lucy, Benton, etc.), though surrounded by tragedy and death, did have happy moments, and were capable of being happy at times.

Then something happened a couple of books ago: after a tired plotline about a European "werewolf" which spanned a couple of books, the point of view changed to third person, the story became much more of an ensemble cast with Scarpetta as one of the characters, and everything became permeated by a depressing, unhappy, dreary atmosphere that sucked the happiness out of the characters, and turned them into automatons who did nothing else but work, argue, and deal with death. Gone was any "off-time", sense of humor, or even sense of hope. Gone was also any sense of realism, as every new books showed Lucy's fortune more and more outlandish with mansions, academies, motorcycles, helicopters, improbable stunts and toys of all kinds.

This time we're asked to believe Lucy's fortune has started a private "academy" that supports police investigation. But what happened to Lucy's previous endeavors, The Last Precinct? What about other characters present in the previous book that have been dropped without so much as a mention? And how about the new ones in this book whom we are asked to know about without ever having heard about them (when Johnny Swift was being talked about as if I was supposed to know who he was, I swear I thought I skipped a book)? How much time has passed between Trace and Predator? It's really hard to tell.

Let's move on to the story. It seems that we've traded the suspense and interesting crime scene investigations by Scarpetta's team of talented forensic scientists of the eralier novels, for incredibly gruesome, sick, twisted descriptions of tortured, mutilated, decomposing bodies, simply described for shock factor. I am not sure how someone comes up with twisted stuff like this, but I had to put the book down at one point when one of the villains (Jenrette) described how he blinded his victims. It was just too much. Perhaps Cornwell might want to consider subjecting herself to the Predator study? She should know better than to replace storytelling with pure guts/gore. Her readers are smarter than that. Blood and a truly convoluted plot line are not cutting it.