Tag Archives: books by Patricia Cornwell

Identity Unknown, by Patricia Cornwell*****

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Patricia Cornwell’s Scarpetta series is among my favorites. Identity Unknown, the 28th in the series, is every bit as riveting as her earlier ones, and I am thrilled to have received a review copy. My thanks go to Grand Central Publishing, NetGalley, and Hachette Audio. This book is for sale now.

First, I have to offer a shout out to January LaVoy, who reads the audio version. I was unsure how I would feel about this one, because I read the first 27 installments with my own eyes, and so I had developed the voices for each character in my head. Would I be thrown by the way they were voiced by a professional? As it happens, no. The protagonist and her ever present sidekick, Pete Marino, who is now her brother-in-law, sound exactly as I had thought they would. Of course, much of this comes down to excellent writing. The voices of her niece, Lucy, who now occupies the top echelons of governmental spookdom, is softer and slightly higher pitched than I had expected, but it fits, and I made the mental transition easily. Kay’s husband, Benton, doesn’t have as deep a voice as I would have thought, but to make his voice that deep would require a second, male reader. All told, LaVoy does a fine job, and I didn’t feel distracted from the story.

I have begun reading the DRC when I am provided the audio, and so from there forward, I switch to the audio, referring occasionally to the DRC to make notes or highlight possible quotations. Once the climax comes, however, the tension gets the better of me, and because I know I can read faster than LaVoy can talk, I switch back to the text.

The premise is that there have been two deaths. The first is an old boyfriend of Kay’s, a man named Sal Giordano. They have remained friends over the years, and she saw him recently when she dropped off a basket of goodies for his birthday. He has been the victim of a death flight, which is new to me but apparently, according to Wiki, is a thing. It involves killing someone by dropping them from a plane.

Holy crap!

Now we get into aspects of the case that make it an even better October read, as well as darkly funny. The prose itself doesn’t appear to be intentionally humorous, and yet I cannot, for the life of me, imagine that Cornwell didn’t snicker a bit as she wrote it. The area where Sal is dropped is inside an abandoned amusement park with a Wizard of Oz theme. It’s been vandalized, and is seriously creepy. The higher ups within the U.S. military are in on the investigation, and so:

“’Let me make sure this is clear,’ General Gunner says to me. ‘He landed on the Yellow Brick Road in the middle of an apple orchard.’

“’Inside the Haunted Forest. Yes.’”

I couldn’t help myself. I squawked out loud!

Soon another corpse is identified, a child belonging to a pair of wealthy, powerful people that are also terrible human beings, and as it happens, horrible parents. The two deaths are connected. The parents throw their weight around and try to manipulate the investigation, but of course, they don’t succeed.

Ultimately it seems that one of the guilty parties is Kay’s nemesis, Carrie Grethen. Carrie was once Lucy’s true love; later, her evil nature became apparent, but nobody can seem to keep her locked up, and she has become Kay’s Moriarty. I mention this here because it is raised early in the story, so I don’t think it can be called a spoiler, but I won’t say more about that.

To the faithful readership, I will also say this. As the book opens, two of Cornwell’s old standbys, ones that I’d be happy to see her retire, appear. First, she has to be driven to the scene in a helicopter, but oh no, there’s a storm coming. I was irritated. Can Kay not go anywhere without there being a storm? Just once? Please? And then something has to be retrieved by diving, which harks back to an earlier book in which she’s attacked with a spear gun. But friends, neither of these turns out to be key to the story, and we’re done with them in a heartbeat, so be patient.

I like to read a few books at a time for variety, but once this one began, it edged out the others—except at bedtime, because when I go to bed, I need to sleep! It’s among her finest work, and I recommend it wholeheartedly to you.

Unnatural Death, by Patricia Cornwell*****

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Unnatural Death is the twenty-seventh installment in the Kay Scarpetta series by Patricia Cornwell, and it’s as good as they get. My thanks go to NetGalley and Grand Central Publishing for the review copy. You can get it now.

For those not conversant with the series, Scarpetta is a medical examiner for the state of Virginia. She’s moved around over the course of the series, decamped to Boston, and come back. So now she’s in her old stomping grounds, but all is not well. The obnoxious, obstructive secretary she was saddled with in the last book, a miserable woman that blamed her for the ouster of the corrupt man that came before, has been—finally—fired, but somehow, she is back in a different government position in the same building, along with the corrupt guy she likes working with, so it’s tense.

Our other permanent characters are Pete Marino, who’s worked with Kay forever and is now married to her sister, Dorothy, who’s a hot mess; Benton Wesley, Kay’s enigmatic husband, a forensic psychologist that works in extremely high level situations that he can’t tell Kay about, even when they have a bearing on her life; and Lucy, her adult niece whom she has raised as her own, and who is the daughter of Dorothy. Lucy is a wunderkind, a tech wizard employed by the FBI, sometimes on loan to the CIA.

I won’t go into the premise for this installment because you can get that in the promotional blurb, but I will tell you that by the ten percent mark I was riveted, and before the halfway point my notes say, “I hate being away from this thing.” A shocking development occurs that is much more impactful to those of us that have followed the series from the start. I have heard other reviewers say that they used to read the series, then lost the habit, so I will say this: if you have read most of the series but missed a book here or there, you can still get the full measure of this thriller. If you just missed the most recent one, that’s okay. But if you go into this book cold, your very first time reading a Scarpetta book, some of the magic will be missing. Perhaps you will read it and be impressed enough to go back and binge read the whole series. It’s not a bad idea!

Any author that writes a long running, successful series like this has to flesh out the main characters to keep readers’ attention. For the first few books, pure plot-based adrenaline rushes are possible, but at some point, there’s going to be a credibility issue continuing that way. I would have difficulty believing that a forensic coroner had been kidnapped by bad guys and hurled into the back of a vehicle, bound and gagged, even once, but when it happens over and over, I’m done and I’m done. Cornwell does the smart thing instead, developing crises that are sometimes more about others in Kay’s family, but that nevertheless spill over onto her in a big way. In doing this, she forces us to examine questions that have no easy answers. For example, if an extremely dangerous development comes up that could affect you or your family, but it is also a matter of national security, and one family member knows, should they break the vows of their office in order to let you or other family members know? Or should they keep it ambiguous, along the lines of, “Maybe you should stay home today?” What if two know, and you don’t?

One way or the other, this story is a wild ride. The tension is occasionally broken up by Marino’s fixation on Bigfoot. He’s obsessed, and it cracks me up when we’re worried about killer drones and enemies unseen, and then Marino pipes up about the big ole footprint he found in the woods. For quite awhile I have wondered why Cornwell hasn’t been made a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America. Hopefully, this outstanding novel will serve as a clarion call. Highly recommended.

Livid, by Patricia Cornwell*****

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I really enjoyed this, the 26th entry into the Kay Scarpetta series. From time to time, people publish unhappy reviews, but for me, it never gets old. In this one, a terrorist attack is made locally, and it’s associated with an attempt on the life of the U.S. president, who is in town at the time it occurs. Kay is, of course, the chief coroner, and she’s forced to perform the autopsy on someone she knows.

The ending isn’t satisfying, and with any other author, I’d knock off the last star. But with Cornwell, I know from experience that when she does this, it’s because it isn’t really over. This will come up again, if not in the next book, then in another soon after it.

Because I couldn’t get the galley, I checked out the audio book at Seattle Bibliocommons. The audio is kind of a mixed bag. I like how the narrator voices the protagonist, and she also does recurring character Pete Marino well. I thought it was wrong to read the voice of Lucy, Kay’s badass adult niece, with a higher pitched voice than any of the other characters. She is a daredevil that doesn’t suffer fools, and if anything, her voice should be lower in pitch than Kay’s. I also thought she made the judge a bit too languid sounding, which is at odds with the things she says. In short, if you are a reader that enjoys both audiobooks and print ones, go with the print. If you like only audiobooks, then go ahead.

If you haven’t read this series, I do suggest you begin with the first and work your way up. I might not have enjoyed this one so much if I didn’t know the characters.

Quantum, by Patricia Cornwell**

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I’m a longtime fan of Cornwell’s Scarpetta series, so when Amazon offered me a free, early look at this first book in the new Captain Chase series, I was over the moon. Thanks go to Amazon First Reads, and I am sorry not to provide the kind of review that I expected to write, but this one doesn’t work for me.

Whereas her earlier series was the original forensic thriller genre, Calli Chase, our protagonist, is a cop for NASA. Perhaps I should have seen this problem coming. I am generally not interested in the sciences, at least to any detail. I don’t mean to sound like a Luddite: I maintain the practical knowledge necessary to raise plants, provide quick home-medical treatment when called upon, and carry off other every day, practical matters. But physics? Chemistry? That whooshing sound right now was me leaving the room. So all of the science chatter early in the narrative led me to close the book and read something else several times, until I realized we were past the pub date and I owed a review. Surely it would get better, once we got into the actual plot. We have heavy foreshadowing that lets us know that some big bad event is about to unfold, and more foreshadowing that tells us there are some great big ol’ skeletons in Calli’s closet and that of her twin, Carme.

But that’s another matter. The foreshadowing used in the Scarpetta series is masterful stuff, suffusing me with a profound sense of dread that makes me turn the pages faster just to know what in the world is around the corner. This foreshadowing, on the other hand, is so heavily troweled on that it makes me impatient. This foreshadowing feels like filler by the 25 percent mark, and there are places in my notes where I say, Enough already. What. Just tell us and get on with it.

As Cornwell’s Scarpetta became a long-running series, she did what great writers of the genre do, moving more deeply into character. After a certain point readers became jaundiced as our hero was once again knocked out, blindfolded, and stuffed in a car trunk or whatever–how many times can this happen to the same person?–and so she moved more toward a psychological thriller, where there were possible enemies within the fortress, so to speak. Could she really trust her Benton, her husband, who is keeping secrets from her? Could she trust her niece? What about her work partner? There was all sorts of scheming and things were not as they appeared. Some readers grew cranky at this point, but I found it fascinating, because I felt I knew her core characters so completely.

But with Captain Chase none of this works, because the author has basically created the same characters with different names and relationships. Perhaps wary of this inclination, the protagonist is unlike Scarpetta, but obnoxiously so, and Chase is not a character I believe. Every tenth word from this character is a euphemism, with copious amounts of the first person narrative explaining and re-explaining how much she hates vulgar language. But whereas I have no problem with most off-color language, I’ve had people in my life that avoided it on principle, usually due to a religious conviction, and not one of them used euphemisms like this character does. Most of them believe that a euphemism is wrong because it’s a swear word dressed up as something else, and the best thing to do is omit them altogether. Instead of yelling ‘Gosh darn,’ they would say ‘Oh no!’ or, ‘How did this happen?’ But with Chase, it’s one long eye-roll, and so when we get to our less-than-stirring climax and she actually says, “Shit!” (and then of course has to talk about having actually said that word) I let out a snort and closed the book. I quit at 85 percent and didn’t stick around for the ending.

It’s a sorry thing, having to write a review like this for an author I like, because of course I cannot help but wonder what personal circumstances would make a bestselling author write and publish something this unworthy. Money? Health? But I don’t know, and ultimately my responsibility is not to the author but to my readers.

As for you, if you are fascinated with NASA, maybe you won’t find this story as repellent as I do, but I would urge you not to spend big on it. Get it free or cheap unless your pockets are very, very deep.