Reclusive author Beryl Madison finds no safe haven from months of menacing phone calls -- or the tormented feeling that her every move is being watched. When the writer is found slain in her own home, Kay Scarpetta pieces together the intricate forensic evidence -- while unwittingly edging closer to a killer waiting in the shadows....
]]>Perhaps because Kate Reading has also narrated Cornwell's Unnatural Exposure and Cause of Death, her voice conveys experience and the history of what has come before, allowing listeners to hear between the lines. Using a subtle but effective range of vocal inflections, Reading lifts the characters off the page and carries them along as the plot spins ever faster, tangling Scarpetta in a snarl of arson, deceit and psychopathic murder. With her nemesis making threats and suspicious fires leaving calcified corpses, Dr. Scarpetta's long-overdue romantic getaway has gone up in smoke. It's just one more day at the morgue and Point of Origin, another hit in the popular series of Scarpetta mysteries, finds the good doctor's attitude honed to a razor sharp point.--George Laney
]]>Despite her personal problems, Scarpetta is still the reigning diva at the department of death. She is sent to investigate the putrefied remains of a man found inside a container ship, "eyes bulged froglike, and the scalp and beard were sloughing off with the outer layer of darkening skin." Kay finds strange, animal-like hairs on the man's clothing--the same hairs that she discovers on a murdered store clerk a few days later. In actuality, the bizarre killings extend well beyond Virginia; whoever killed the Richmond victims also butchered people in France. Kay and police captain Pete Marino are whisked off to Paris where they must collect top-secret information from a Paris morgue, and avoid becoming victims themselves.
This macabre tome is the stuff that classic Scarpetta tales are made of: creepy but compulsive autopsy scenes, plentiful plot twists, and the compelling, if slightly more vulnerable chief medical examiner herself. --Naomi Gesinger
]]>It seems like an ideal situation, until the new battles start-with local politicians, with entrenched interests, with someone whose covert attempts at sabotage are clearly meant to run Scarpetta out of town. And that's before the murders and other violent deaths even begin.
A young man from a well-known family jumps off a water tower. A woman is found ritualistically murdered in her multimillion-dollar beach home. The body of an abused young boy is discovered dumped in a desolate marsh. Meanwhile, in distant New England, problems with a prominent patient at a Harvard-affiliated psychiatric hospital begin to hint at interconnections that are as hard to imagine as they are horrible.
Kay Scarpetta has dealt with many brutal and unusual crimes before, but never a string of them as baffling, or as terrifying, as the ones confronting her now. Before she is through, that book of the dead will contain many names-and the pen may be poised to write in her own.
The first name in forensics. The last name in suspense. Once again, Patricia Cornwell proves her exceptional ability to entertain and enthrall.
]]>The madcap doings get underway when the addled, nearly blind governor of Virginia confusedly launches a speed-trap program on isolated Tangier Island, whose prickly, eccentric residents promptly attempt secession. Cornwell adeptly interweaves other crisscrossing plot lines involving a gang of street-stupid thugs gunning for Hammer and Brazil, an angel-faced serial killer, a kidnapped dog and more. She does miss a few beats: the pacing sags during certain episodes, and at times the writing strains so hard for laughs that instead it draws winces. Nonetheless, Isle of Dogs is for the most part a funny, diverting read and a refreshing departure for Cornwell. --Nicholas H Allison, Amazon.com
]]>The childhood years of the future Mrs. Billy Graham were spent light-years away--in the China of the 1920s and 1930s. The daughter of medical missionaries, she and her family were caught in a crucible of unspeakable hardship; in addition to pestilence and plague, there was the unstable political and military turmoil surrounding the Nationalist government, the Communists, and the Japanese invaders. These hazardous realities shaped Ruth Bell and her family, a family inured to difficulties, but buoyed up by their deep belief in God's abiding will.
Virtually raised by the Grahams, the author is a repository of Ruth Bell Graham's stories and has seen firsthand the spirit of this courageous woman. Patricia Cornwell not only gives readers a full, rounded, and intimate portrait of Ruth Bell Graham, but also insight into the life of the Graham family and particularly Billy Graham.
]]>In Body of Evidence, Scarpetta investigates the murder of a Southern writer who mysteriously opened the door for her killer. In All That Remains, she hunts a serial killer of young lovers--including the daughter of the president's drug czar, which complicates the forensic chase with political intrigue.
Besides suspenseful cat-and-mouse games between sleuth and killer (and writer and reader), Cornwell creates a rich cast of screwed-up characters, chiefly Scarpetta's scruffy confrere, Detective Pete Marino. Scarpetta's character is a magnetic combination of pride, drive, brains, extreme skill at cooking, and a pervasive sadness expressed with tightly wound eloquence. With these books, Cornwell (a descendant of Harriet Beecher Stowe) increased her book deal from $6,000 to $24 million. She earned it.
]]>All that Remains:
A serial killer is loose in Richmond, specializing in attractive young couples whose bodies are invariably found in the woods months later –– minus their shoes and socks. Chief Medical Officer Dr. Kay Scarpetta finds herself tracking a killer who scrupulously eliminates every clue, rendering all her
forensic skills useless. This time it's her courage and intuition on the line in a race against time.
Cruel and Unusual:
When convicted killer Ronnie Joe Waddell is executed in Virginia's electric chair, he becomes what should be a routine case for Chief Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta. But after Waddell's execution, everyone connected to him begins to die – including a member of Scarpetta's staff. When crucial records disappear from her files, Scarpetta comes under fire for incomeptence. Caught in a web of political intrigue, she must fight to free herself from murderous insinuations and threats to her own life. She soon finds herself retracing Waddell's bloody footprints, following a trail that might lead to long–hidden secrets deep within the state government. Either the truth will set her free – or unleash upon her a punishment both cruel and unusual.
]]>Postmortem
A serial killer is on the loose in Richmond, Virginia. Three women have died, brutalized and strangled in their own bedrooms. There is little pattern: the killer appears to strike at random -- but always early on Saturday mornings.
When Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta is awakened at 2:33 A.M., she knows the news is bad: there is a fourth victim, and she fears now for those who may follow unless she finds the forensic evidence that can break the case.
But not everyone wants her help. Not everyone is pleased to see a woman in this powerful job. Someone may even want to ruin her career and reputation before she can find the killer.
Body of Evidence
A reclusive writer is dead, and her final manuscript has disappeared...
Someone is stalking Beryl Madison. Someone who spies on her and makes threatening, obscene phone calls. Terrified, Beryl flees to Key West -- but eventually she must return to her Richmond home. The very night she arrives, Beryl inexplicably invites her killer inside.
Thus begins for Dr. Kay Scarpetta the investigation of a crime that is as convoluted as it is bizarre. Why would Beryl open the door to someone who would brutally slash and then neatly decapitate her? Did she know her killer? Adding to the intrigue is Beryl's enigmatic relationship with a prizewinning author and the disappearance of her own manuscript.
As Scarpetta retraces Beryl's footsteps, an investigation that begins in the laboratory with microscopes and lasers leads her deep into a nightmare that soon becomes her own.
]]>All That Remains
A killer is stalking young lovers. Taking their lives and leaving just a tantalizing clue.
When the bodies of young couples start turning up in remote woodland areas, Dr. Kay Scarpetta's task as Virginia's Chief Medical Examiner is made more difficult by the effects of the elements. Eight times she must write that the cause of death is undetermined.
But when the latest young woman to go missing is the daughter of one of America's most powerful women, Kay also finds herself prey to political pressure and press harassment. The killings must stop. Now.
Scarpetta soon discovers that someone is withholding vital evidence, or even faking it. Meanwhile, a cunning sadistic killer is still at large.
Cruel & Unusual
At 11:05 one December evening in Richmond, Virginia, convicted murderer Ronnie Joe Waddell is pronounced dead in the electric chair. At the morgue, Dr. Kay Scarpetta has been waiting for Waddell's body. Preparing to perform a postmortem before the subject is dead is a strange feeling for Scarpetta, but she has been here before. And Waddell's death is not the only newsworthy event on this freezing night: the grotesquely wounded body of a young boy is found propped against a garbage Dumpster. To Scarpetta, the two cases seem unrelated, until she recalls that the body of Waddell's victim had been arranged in a strikingly similar position.
Was Waddell innocent? Is someone else out there, who may attack again?
]]>