3 1/2 stars.

In this, her fourth Scarpetta book, Patricia Cornwell finally begins to show us just what she is capable of as a writer. While her first book, "Postmortem", had an excellent story, it suffered from some poor writing and an apparent need by Cornwell to show off how much she knows. Her writing was greatly improved in her second book, "Body of Evidence", and continued to improve in her third, "All That Remains", but the stories in both of those failed to live up to the excitement and promise of "Postmortem". While the story in "Cruel and Unusual" is still not as good as the first one, it is much better than in the second and third Scarpetta books and her writing has continued to improve. There was no dead space in the middle of the book, causing my interest to lag, as there was in both "Body" and "Remains". My only real complaints with this book, which kept me from giving it a higher rating, were the repetition of events that she had used in her first book (someone breaking into her office computers, bringing her teen-aged niece in as the only one who could solve those break-ins, and the conpiracy of high ranking officials trying to discredit Scarpetta) and a rather soft ending that didn't quite live up to everything that came before it. It also highlighted a problem that Cornwell has had in all of her Scarpetta books to this point: her seeming inability to fuse the different sides of Scarpetta into one, complete whole of a character. We either have Scarpetta the tough, hard-nosed, no-nonsense professional or Scarpetta the sensitive woman trying to deal with her personal fears and crises. There seems to be no meeting of these two sides and almost feels, at times, as if Cornwell is writing about two different characters who have little to nothing to do with each other. In spite of those drawbacks, though, this was still a good read and makes me hopeful that her stories will continue to get better and that her writing won't begin to lag. I look forward to the next book in the series with much anticipation.