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Summary
Summary
Dr. Kay Scarpetta is starting over with a unique private forensic pathology practice in Charleston, South Carolina. But in this thrilling #1 New York Times bestseller, her fresh start ushers in a string of murders more baffling--and terrifying--than any that have come before...
The Book of the Dead is the morgue log, the ledger in which all cases are entered by hand. For Kay Scarpetta, however, it is about to acquire a new meaning.
A sixteen-year-old tennis star, fresh from a tournament win Charleston, is found nude and mutilated near Piazza Navona in Rome. The body of an abused young boy is dumped in a desolate marsh. A woman is ritualistically murdered in her multimillion-dollar beach home. Meanwhile, in New England, problems with a prominent patient at a Harvard-affiliated psychiatric hospital begin to hint at interconnections among the deaths that are as hard to imagine as they are horrible.
Scarpetta has dealt with many brutal and unusual crimes before, but never has she seen a string of death like what she's facing now. Before she is through, that book of the dead will contain many names--and the pen may be poised to write her own...
Author Notes
Patricia Cornwell was born in Miami, Florida on June 9, 1956. When she was nine years old, her mother tried to give her and her two brothers to evangelist Billy Graham and his wife to care for. For a while the children lived with missionaries since their mother was unable to care for them.
After graduating from Davidson College in 1979, she worked for The Charlotte Observer eventually covering the police beat and winning an investigative reporting award from the North Carolina Press Association for a series of articles on prostitution and crime in downtown Charlotte. Her award-winning biography of Ruth Bell Graham, the wife of Billy Graham, A Time for Remembering, was published in 1983. From 1984 to 1990, she worked as a technical writer and a computer analyst at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Richmond, Virginia. While working for the medical examiner, she began to write novels. Although the award-winning novel Postmortem was initially rejected by seven different publishers, once it was published in 1990 it became the only novel ever to win the Edgar, Creasey, Anthony, and Macavity awards as well as the French Prix du Roman d'Adventure, in one year.
She is the author of the Kay Scarpetta series, the Andy Brazil series, and the Winston Garano series. She has also written two cookbooks entitled Scarpetta's Winter Table and Food to Die For; a children's book entitled Life's Little Fable; and non-fiction works like Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper - Case Closed.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Bestseller Cornwell's 15th novel to feature Dr. Kay Scarpetta (after 2005's Predator) delivers her trademark grisly crime scenes, but lacks the coherence and emotional resonance of earlier books. Soon after relocating to Charleston, S.C., to launch a private forensics lab, Scarpetta is asked to consult on the murder of U.S. tennis star Drew Martin, whose mutilated body was found in Rome. Contradictory evidence leaves Scarpetta, the Italian carabinieri and Scarpetta's lover, forensic psychologist Benton Wesley, stumped. But when she discovers unsettling connections between Martin's murder, the body of an unidentified South Carolina boy and her old nemesis, the maniacal psychiatrist Dr. Marilyn Self, Scarpetta encounters a killer as deadly as any she's ever faced. With her recent switch from first- to third-person narration, Cornwell loses what once made her series so compelling: a window into the mind of a strong, intelligent woman holding her own in a profession dominated by men. Here, the abrupt shifts in point of view slow the momentum, and the reader flounders in excessive forensic minutiae. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Pioneering pathologist Kay Scarpetta (Trace, 2004, etc.) goes up against a wraithlike killer whose self-appointed mission is to "relieve others of their suffering." Practice, practice, practice. If only 16-year-old South Carolina tennis phenom Drew Martin had stuck to the court instead of going off to Rome to party, her tortured corpse wouldn't be baffling the Italian authorities, headed inexplicably by medico legale Capt. Ottorino Poma, and the International Investigative Response team, which includes both Scarpetta and her lover, forensic psychologist Benton Wesley. But the young woman's murder and the gruesome forensic riddles it poses are something of a sideshow to the main event: the obligatory maundering of the continuing cast. Wesley still won't leave Boston for the woman he tepidly insists he loves. Scarpetta's niece, computer whiz Lucy Farinelli, continues to be jealously protective of her aunt. Scarpetta's investigator, Pete Marino, is so besotted by the trailer-trash pickup who's pushing his buttons that he does some terrible things. And Scarpetta herself is threatened by every misfit in the known universe, from a disgruntled mortician to oracular TV shrink Marilyn Self. Cornwell's trademark forensics have long since been matched by Karin Slaughter and CSI. What's most distinctive about this venerable franchise is the kitchen-sink plotting; the soap-opera melodrama that prevents any given volume from coming to a satisfying end; and the emphasis on titanic battles between Scarpetta and a series of Antichrists. Proceed at your own risk. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
It's hard to fault Cornwell for trying to redeem herself after missing the mark with her last few Kay Scarpetta novels, but this new one won't do the trick. The frosty forensic pathologist and her entourage remain as annoyingly self-absored and screwed up as ever, and their emotional baggage once again gets in the way of the story. A lengthy, vivid scene during which a young tennis star is slowly and brutally tortured sets up the mystery, which unfolds in artless leaps, mostly through halting dialogue and occasional forays into the mind of the killer. Once again Cornwell trots out venal characters from previous Scarpetta books; prominent here is psycho-bitch teleshrink Dr. Self (Predator, 2005), who is hoarding information about what turns out to be a string of loosely related murders. Then there's Scarpetta's longtime investigator, Pete Marino, foulmouthed and crude but tolerated, who reveals true ugliness in what may be the best scene in the book. As to forensic detail, it seems right up to the minute, and Scarpetta uses it often in her search for the killer, all the while trying to preserve balance in her personal life. Only for diehard Cornwell fans, of whom there are still many, despite the author's continued slump.--Zvirin, Stephanie Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
One thing must be said for Patricia Cornwell: she's got guts. And not just in the crime lab where her protagonist cuts up the cadavers of murder victims. In BOOK OF THE DEAD (Putnam, $26.95), her 15th novel to feature the brilliant and abrasive forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta, Cornwell overhauls key elements of this successful series to take account of both the scientific advances made since 1990, when "Postmortem" was published, and the competition from others who have entered her once esoteric field. Cornwell has noted that "the interior world of forensic science and medicine was a dark and chilly secret" when she wrote her first book, based on her experiences in the office of Virginia's chief medical examiner. Back then, it made sense for a crack pathologist like Scarpetta to plug away alone in the lab and conduct her fieldwork in the company of a blunt homicide cop like Pete Marino. Nowadays, though, a public educated by "C.S.I." expects sexy scientists working in sleek crime labs with cool equipment. Cornwell begins her upgrade on a case that starts in Rome, where a 16-year-old American tennis star is murdered by a psychopath with a macabre style of postmortem mutilation. But the plot doesn't really take hold until it shifts to Charleston, S.C., where Scarpetta has opened a private practice. Once she and her computer-genius niece have the lab fully up and running, the facilities should knock your eye out. Meanwhile, Scarpetta's grand ambitions are projected by her use of "the largest scanning electron microscope on the planet" to analyze the grains of sand the killer leaves in his victims' bodies. But enhancing Scarpetta's scientific status is only one part of Cornwell's remodeling job; she also sets her sights on characters who don't carry the weight they once did. Marino, for one, really feels the pinch. ("I didn't use to be like this," he says, after a particularly appalling blunder.) She might consider that Benton Wesley, stuffy when he was an F.B.I, profiler and even stuffier now that he's on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, also has the whiff of redundancy. And then there's Dr. Marilyn Self, "the most famous psychiatrist in the world," so jealous of Scarpetta she keeps shoving her way into cases that would be better off without her. In trying to reassert Scarpetta's supremacy, Cornwell hasn't exactly purged the series of tired formulas and worn-out cast members. But she has shaken things up a bit and produced one terrific new character, a bodyguard named Bull who's helping Scarpetta tend her neglected garden. It will be interesting to see what grows there. When it comes to paranormal mysteries, the really silly stuff about vampire sleuths and psychic cops can be found all over TV. But grafting supernatural elements onto straightforward detective stories is also a trend in genre fiction, and THE KINGDOM OF BONES (Shaye Areheart/Crown, $24.95), by Stephen Gallagher, shows the occult mystery in its best light. Vividly set in England and America during the booming industrial era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this stylish thriller conjures a perfect demon to symbolize the age and its appetites, an entity that inhabits characters eager to barter their souls for fame and fortune. When met, this demon is residing in Edmund Whitlock, an actor whose life gives us entry into the colorful world of traveling theatricals. When Whitlock passes on his curse to the company soubrette, the troupe manager follows her to America, intent on rescuing her, and runs afoul of the law. Although Gallagher delivers horror with a grand melodramatic flourish, his storytelling skills are more subtly displayed in scenes of the provincial theaters, gentlemen's sporting clubs and amusement parks where a now-vanished society once took its rough pleasures. As a first novel with an easygoing sleuth and a not-too-tough mystery to solve, Jon Loomis's HIGH SEASON (St. Martin's Minotaur, $23.95) is the kind of book that can be overshadowed by its heavyweight competitors. And that would be an undeserved fate for this entertaining whodunit set in Provincetown, Mass., which warmly captures the free and funky spirit of that famously tolerant beach community. Frank Coffin, its first and only police detective, thinks he can handle the case of a married televangelist who turns up dead at a gay men's beach in a flowered muumuu. But can he deal with all the nosy and bossy characters who push their way into the investigation? Although the body count runs too high for serious credibility, Loomis drenches the narrative with so much local color that the reader comes away feeling like a native. Every violent death in a Henning Mankell police procedural incites deep rumination by his Swedish detective, Kurt Wallander, about the moral corruption that breeds crime. The violent death in KENNEDY'S BRAIN (New Press, $26.95), a novel from which Wallander is absent, also sets off troubled thinking on the part of Louise Cantor, an archaeologist who returns from a dig in Greece to find her son dead in his flat. Rejecting the police's conclusion that he committed suicide, she travels to Spain, Australia and Mozambique in search of answers to her questions about her son and the issues, like the AIDS epidemic in Africa, that mattered to him. All this is conveyed with grave solemnity in Laurie Thompson's translation, but because Louise lacks Wallander's milder voice and keener sensibility, her moral outrage becomes too shrill. The world of forensic science was 'a dark and chilly secret' when Patricia Cornwell wrote her first novel.
Library Journal Review
This just in: Kay Scarpetta seeks peace of mind by moving to Charleston, SC, and opening a forensic pathology practice. And then the sabotage begins. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.