I am not a fan of abridged books, in any format (I don’t trust them); but I agreed to listen to this book on a sufficiently long car trip, and pretty much enjoyed the book; I do think there were several plot holes, improbable situations, and insufficiently tied up strings, but I do not know if that is a fault of the book itself or of the abridgement process.

It is New Year’s Day of 2007, and Dr. Kay Scarpetta is called from her job as a Medical Examiner in Massachusetts by her husband, forensic psychologist Benton Wesley, to examine a voluntary patient at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. The patient, Dr. Oskar Bane, has refused to talk to anyone except Scarpetta, even though she has never met him; he is an achondroplastic dwarf (with a normal torso, but stunted limbs), and claims that he is being framed for the murder of his girlfriend, who is (or was) also an achondroplastic dwarf, and who was found by Bane to have been brutally murdered on the previous evening, New Year’s Eve. He also says that he is being stalked by “them”, and becomes angry at Scarpetta when she says that she has never heard of his girlfriend.

I had never read one of the books about Dr. Scarpetta before (periodically, I would have to stop the CD and ask my husband who someone was, as continuing characters from the series kept coming up); I enjoyed this book, even though the character of Scarpetta kept reminding me of that of Aeneas in the Aeneid by Virgil, who starts out god-like and becomes even more so. But I did not love this book, and may or may not eventually read more books in the series.