SCARPETTA
Patricia Cornwell
Berkley
Mystery
Hardcover: 9780399155161
Paperback: 9780425230169
These days, thanks to TV, forensics is practically a household word, and the crime scene, autopsy and post mortem have become fixtures of any cop drama or detective story. But before “CSI” there was Kay Scarpetta, Patricia Cornwell’s chief medical examiner: brilliant, courageous, complicated and literally up to her elbows in blood. Born in 1988 with a novel called POSTMORTEM, this scientist heroine was a pioneer in what was then largely a man’s field (maybe women were presumed to be too squeamish?); she aroused my feminist instincts and piqued my interest in a rather ghoulish line of work. I was fascinated by the way Scarpetta gets an individual who has been violently silenced to “speak” through his or her corpse --- almost as if she were receiving messages from beyond the grave. The books satisfied my lust for justice as well as my taste for grisly detail, and the 16th in the series, SCARPETTA, is no exception.
Scarpetta’s intimate “family” is all here: her longtime love, FBI forensic psychologist Benton Wesley; her homicide-detective sidekick, Pete Marino; and her computer-genius niece, Lucy Farinelli. Since the last book Scarpetta and Benton have married and moved to Massachusetts, but they also work as consultants to the New York City Police Department and Medical Examiner’s Office. The book starts with Scarpetta, in mid-autopsy, being summoned to Manhattan to examine a suspect in (what else?) a sadistic, sexually tinged murder. (For new readers, Scarpetta’s specialty is deranged serial killers. Of course.)
Cornwell, as always, serves up some intriguing twists. She seems implicitly to be striking a blow for minority rights when both the first victim and the main suspect, Oscar Bane, turn out to be “little people” --- about four feet tall, with standard-size heads and upper bodies but truncated arms and legs (Oscar tells Scarpetta that people treat him like “a circus freak”). SCARPETTA also mines the emerging power of cyberspace and the peril of stolen identities. An online gossip column, Gotham Gotcha, has been printing scurrilous and vicious stories about Scarpetta, and nobody knows who’s behind them. Enter Lucy, who now has her own lucrative forensic computer firm --- and her own plane! --- and who teams up (in more ways than one) with the attractive local prosecutor. And finally there is Marino. This tough, clever, self-destructive man, as fans will remember, always had the hots for Scarpetta, and in BOOK OF THE DEAD, the novel before this one, he got drunk (and desperate) enough to assault her. Marino is now working for the NYPD, and of course he happens to be involved in the same case Scarpetta is investigating. Their paths cross. I will say no more.
Unfortunately, I don’t think Cornwell has entirely solved the problem --- chronic when you write a long-running series --- of making a book work for both faithful readers and new ones. It’s one thing to address an audience already familiar with Scarpetta’s closest associates --- who have “known” Lucy, as it were, since she was 10 years old; who have followed the ups and downs of Scarpetta’s romance with Benton (he was married when they met) and her peregrinations from Virginia to Florida to South Carolina; who had a grudging respect and affection for Marino and were shocked by what he did (I’ve been reading Cornwell since the early ’90s, and I sure was). It’s a different story if a reader is encountering them for the first time.
Do you reintroduce everyone early in the book? Do you focus on the narrative at hand and tuck in explanations and details later, where you can? Cornwell seems to have decided on the latter strategy. Initially, SCARPETTA consists mostly of long, talky, action-free chapters that set up the case but leave the reader (at least this one) a wee bit bored and confused. In a mystery there’s a fine balance between too much information and too little, and in the first part of this book, the author doesn’t always give us enough to go on.
But if you persist, as admirers surely will, the novel becomes an absorbing read that delivers a tension-filled plot, a gritty sense of the urban landscape, and most of all, another phase in the complex emotional evolution of the core characters. Interviewed by her publisher, Cornwell has said that these days her principal concern is psychological nuance --- “I think as I get older, I’m more interested in why than how or even who” --- and it shows. Her protagonists are no cardboard heroes; they’re troubled and vulnerable as well as brave, smart and humane. We care what happens to them. We’re curious about the next turn their lives will take. Even after two decades, I don’t think we’ve seen the last of Scarpetta.
--- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman
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