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In her fourteenth Kay Scarpetta mystery, Patricia Cornwell has woven her characters into elements of the same case (albeit without their knowledge). They are all on edge about their personal lives, relationships, and especially their long dependence upon and affection for each other. The mutual trusts that have been so hard-won over the years are steadily eroding, and in PREDATOR, long-buried resentments, unresolved anger and desperation erupt among the members of this once cohesive in-group, thus setting forth a novel essentially structured around the collective ennui of the regular characters. Of course, murder and mayhem ooze with expected horrors, but just as important in this book is the interesting interchanges that occur as the cast tries to cope and reach out to one another for support.
For Cornwell to set her crew at such a crossroads is the move of a courageous writer who has faith in her talent and understands her audience. The complicated and very creepy story works within this architectural schematic, and Cornwell is able to deliver a highly charged, rather spooky novel with her usual panache.
Kay is now the head of the National Forensic Academy in Hollywood, Florida, a teaching and research institution established by her niece Lucy. Her friend and lover, Benton Wesley, is now running a research study at McLean Hospital in Boston called "PREDATOR," an acronym for the Prefrontal Determinants of Aggressive-Type Overt Responsivity, a secret neuropsychological project to determine if dangerous murderers have different brain patterns and/or functions than "ordinary" people. The experiments such as brain mapping tests are done on machines like MRIs, and the focus is on Basil Jenrette, who has been in prison for years but all of a sudden admits to a murder that was never reported as such. He is a "lady killer" who feels no remorse and says he will certainly kill again if given the chance. Unfortunately, the doctor in charge of the experiments is a woman.
Meanwhile, Lucy is on some sort of a mission for Benton and struggling with her own demons. She excoriates herself about changes in her body and her reckless habit of "hooking up" with strangers for one-night stands. She is in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where a beautiful young woman with whom she spends the night and who stalks her in the morning seduces her.
Pete Marino, a former Virginia detective, is in Florida too. He is the Academy's head of investigations and a part-time investigator at the Broward County Medical Examiner's Office. "Of late he looks like a parody of a biker thug…his huge, tattooed arms bulging from a sleeveless denim vest with the Harley logo on the back." He has morphed into an over-the-hill compulsive bodybuilder with a shaved head who outfits himself in full leather regalia, which he believes further promotes his machismo. And the chip he's always carried on his shoulder has been allowed to reach mile-high proportions.
Rose, Kay's loyal secretary, maintains her supporting role as factotum, mediator and "mother." She tries in vain to ground the group and keep some sort of harmony alive among them all.
As the book opens, Kay is trying to spend a romantic week in snowed-in Boston with Benton Wesley. They have not seen each other for a while and have been looking forward to this winter holiday for weeks. But a phone call triggers a series of events that force them to postpone. As Kay is getting ready to leave her office, she sees Pete drive up on his Hog. He asks if she knows anything about the Johnny Swift case. She doesn't. Swift was a San Francisco doctor with an office in Miami, and he and his brother had a place in Hollywood on the beach. "About three months ago at Thanksgiving while [Swift] was at his place down here, his [twin] brother found him on the couch, dead from a shotgun wound to the chest. By the way, he'd just had wrist surgery and it didn't go well. At a glance, a straightforward suicide." But was it? And who would want to kill a California neurosurgeon anyway?
From this point, the plot begins its tortuous trek over and under bodies, asylums, betrayals, kidnappings, disappearances, quarrels, deceptions and torture --- all enmeshed in craziness only someone like Patricia Cornwell could dream up. She goes pretty heavy on the gore and explicit torture, but readers can skip those lines without losing any of the story's force. By any standards it is a gruesome tale told with authority and verve. At first, Cornwell's fans may be put off by the personal elegies and the many changes fate has imposed upon the familiar cast. The grotesqueries of the crimes will raise hackles and may seem disjointed. But once the threads of each event are untangled and a clear picture emerges, readers will agree that PREDATOR is one of Patricia Cornwell's best works to date.
--- Reviewed by Barbara Lipkien Gershenbaum
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