Cornwell Aims Low with Book of the Dead and Manages to Miss
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Author: Patricia Cornwell
Title: Book of the Dead Genre: mystery "Why," queried the doctor, "do you keep hitting yourself in the head with a hammer?" "Because it feels so good when I stop!" replied the patient. For the life of me, I swear this must be the same reason I continue to read the books in Patricia Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta series: because it feels so good when I stop. It's time for an intervention, folks, 'cause I just picked up another one… and it felt! so! good! to finish Book of the Dead that I'm almost tempted to read it again! Except, almost only counts in horseshoes… Gorgeous sixteen-year-old tennis phenom Drew Martin's nude, mutilated body has been dumped along a roadside in Rome a day after she disappeared while partying with friends. The carabinieri call in two of the foremost experts on violent death in the world to take a look: Dr. Kay Scarpetta MD, PhD, Esq., FACP; and ex-FBI profiler Benton Wesley (or is it Wesley Benton?) And just as soon, Scarpetta is back in her new digs in Charleston, South Carolina (hey – when did she move, anyway?) sporting a very significant gift from Wesley. Benton. Whoever. The murder is claimed by The Sandman, except that he doesn't claim it to the press or the fuzz, he claims it to TV shrink and Scarpetta arch-nemesis Dr. Marilyn Self (last seen in PREDATOR), poster girl for the phrase, "physician heal thy Self." Upon receiving the news, Self disappears into a very exclusive Boston hospital (guess who's there!), but not before setting a whole slew of nefarious goings-on in motion, not the least of which is an elegant mind-fuck of her former patient, longtime Scarpetta hanger-on Pete Marino; plus an attempt to defame Scarpetta's filty-rich lesbian brainiac niece, Lucy. That Dr. Self's got quite a set of cojones on her… Scarpetta has her hands full as she sort of works the Drew Martin case, which – ain't this a co-inky-dink – has close ties to Charleston. She's also working on a little boy who'd been neglected to death, and a woman who's disappeared out of her house a few minutes away from Scarpetta's lab, at Hilton Head Gee: wouldn't it be amazing if the murder in Rome and the two in South Carolina were somehow related? As Kay Scarpetta novels go, this one's not quite as bad as some of the more recent installments in the series – but, then, Cornwell's set a pretty low bar of late. Nothing in this century has been anywhere near the equal of the Scarpetta of old, and even once diehard fans of the series are getting tired of waiting for the old Scarpetta to reappear. In the case of Book of the Dead (the name has zip to do with the plot; it's merely a reference to a ledger in which bodies are logged into the morgue), Cornwell expends far more energy in detailing the relationships among Scarpetta and her posse. Problem being that Cornwell's already done the disintegration of those various relationships to death. Scarpetta and Wesley are madly in love but can't live with each other; Lucy's a paranoid control freak, Marino's a loose cannon who's betrayed Lucy's trust one too many times; Rose… well, Rose is Rose. For Book of the Dead, Cornwell scrapes the bottom of the literary barrel. She cobbles together the marriage of master manipulator and Coincidence Fairy, with a set of plot threads that ought to be inscribed "this tape will self-destruct in five seconds…" Characters drop out of sight only to loom on the horizon chapters later; plot threads disappear from the warp and woof only to emerge chapters later. The point of view shifts ever so occasionally to that of the villain, but his appearances offer no insight into his motivation or his character – only that he's clearly psycho. Perhaps the only interesting snippets in the book are the short passages in which Cornwell demonstrates that she's keeping current in the science – and those tend to be more didactic than entertaining. So, once more, Cornwell disappoints. Book of the Dead wastes far too much energy and too much page-count on relationships; on Scarpetta's quarrels, real and imagined; and Cornwell's compulsion to destroy every person that Scarpetta touches. The few, small pieces of the book that comprise the murder mystery lack connection one with the other, and their ultimate solution is fabricated entirely of coincidence and improbability; leaving us with a book that's really not worth bothering to read. all content copyright © 2014 by scmrak
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