Chaos : a Scarpetta novel

Format:

Book (large print)

Title:

Chaos : a Scarpetta novel

Author:

Cornwell, Patricia Daniels author

ISBN:

9781410493248

9781683312307

Edition:

Large print edition.

Publication:

Waterville, Maine : Thorndike Press, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning, 2016.

Physical Description:

591 pages (large print) ; 23 cm

Series title(s):

Scarpetta series ;

Number in series:

BK. 24.

Summary:

In the quiet of twilight, on an early autumn day, twenty-six-year-old Elisa Vandersteel is killed while riding her bicycle along the Charles River. It appears she was struck by lightning--except the weather is perfectly clear with not a cloud in sight. Dr. Kay Scarpetta, the Cambridge Forensic Center's director and chief, decides at the scene that this is no accidental Act of God. Her investigation becomes complicated when she begins receiving a flurry of bizarre poems from an anonymous cyberbully who calls himself Tailend Charlie. Though subsequent lab results support Scarpetta's conclusions, the threatening messages don't stop. When the tenth poem arrives exactly twenty-four hours after Elisa's death, Scarpetta begins to suspect the harasser is involved, and sounds the alarm to her investigative partner Pete Marino and her husband, FBI analyst Benton Wesley. She also enlists the help of her niece, Lucy. But to Scarpetta's surprise, tracking the slippery Tailend Charlie is nearly impossible, even for someone as brilliant as her niece. Also, Lucy can't explain how this anonymous nemesis could have access to private information. To make matters worse, a venomous media is whipping the public into a frenzy, questioning the seasoned forensics chief's judgment and "a quack cause of death on a par with spontaneous combustion."

Personal Subject:

Scarpetta, Kay (Fictitious character)-Fiction.

Scarpetta, Kay (Fictitious character) (OCoLC)fst01106563

Subject(s):

Medical examiners (Law) -- Fiction.

Forensic pathologists -- Fiction.

Women physicians -- Fiction.

Genre:

Large type books.

FICTION -- Thrillers.

Detective and mystery fiction.

Fiction.

Thrillers (Fiction)

Suspense fiction.

Holds:

Available:*

Library	Call Number	Status
Searching... Salem Main Library	LP MYSTERY Cornwell, P.	Searching... Unknown
Searching... McMinnville Public Library	Cornwell, P.	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Newberg Public Library	FICTION CORNWELL	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Stayton Public Library	LP CORNWELL Patricia	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

A #1 New York Times Bestselling AuthorA Scarpetta NovelIn the twilight of an early autumn day, twenty-six-year-old Elisa Vandersteel is killed while cycling along the Charles River. It appears she was struck by lightning -- except there's not a cloud in sight. Dr. Kay Scarpetta, the Cambridge Forensic Center's director and chief, decides at the scene that this is no Act of God.

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 (1)

New York Review of Books Review

AS A WORLD-RENOWNED forensic pathologist, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, the iron-willed protagonist of Patricia Cornwell's insanely popular procedural mysteries, is often called out of town for high-level professional consultations. That pattern is relaxed in CHAOS (Morrow/HarperCollins, $28.99), which finds Scarpetta at home with her husband, Benton Wesley, a criminal-intelligence agent for the F.B.I., and taking care of business as director of the Cambridge Forensic Center. Although she's hardly a lyrical writer, Cornwell allows her heroine a rare opportunity to express her affection for Boston, and especially for her favorite park along the Charles River. "I've been here many times," Scarpetta says, with some warmth, recalling hikes with Benton from their home near the Harvard campus in the "sublime" New England weather of the spring and fall. It doesn't seem fair, then, when a fresh-faced young woman with a British accent - someone Scarpetta and her husband had encountered earlier that day as she rode a bicycle through Cambridge - is found dead on the fitness path along the river. Because Boston is baking in a terrible heat wave, everything seems to be moving more slowly, so it takes half the book to set up a tent to secure the crime scene and allow Scarpetta to examine the corpse. "I'm getting more frustrated with each minute that passes," she fumes. "The body should be in the C.T. scanner. I should be setting up my autopsy station." Cornwell's readers should be able to relate to that. Not only is the autopsy a long time coming, it's less than interesting when Scarpetta finally gets around to it. Surprisingly, the young victim was zapped by a freak electrical charge - the same cause of death, it turns out, that claimed an Army general at the very same time, but hundreds of miles away. The possibility of "weaponized electricity" is the signal for the F.B.I. to step in, entering a plot that features a cyberstalker, a psycho from a previous book; Scarpetta's annoying sister, Dorothy; and Dorothy's brilliant, if seriously disturbed daughter, Lucy. Not one of them is dead and in need of an autopsy, which is a waste of Scarpetta's peculiar talents - and our time. AN ACT OF terrorism is unnerving in itself, but when this sort of violence takes the lives of children, rumblings of vigilante justice are often heard. That's the chaotic scene that greets Chief Inspector Bish Ortley in Melina Marchetta's TELL THE TRUTH, SHAME THE DEVIL (Mulholland/Little, Brown, $26) when he arrives in Calais to retrieve his daughter from a student tour of Normandy that ended abruptly when her bus was bombed and two people died. The French police are quick to suspect yet another student, Violette LeBrac Zidane, who comes from a family of terrorists. Marchetta, who has written several young adult novels, seems to have inside knowledge of the mysterious processes of the teenage brain. A busload of quarrelsome, immature adolescents doesn't daunt her in the least. Although they represent a bubbling melting pot of ethnicities, some with underlying political tensions, her young characters all stand out as individuals. Even at their most infuriating, they're always believable, if not as sympathetic as Bish Ortley, who carries a load of domestic problems on his shoulders. "There's something about him," Marchetta tells us. "The bloodshot eyes and sad teddy bear look. This man comes with a story." In HELL BAY (Minotaur, $25.99), Will Thomas puts a shrewd spin on the country house mystery by converting the traditional manor to a castle and shifting it to a remote location in the Isles of Scilly. ("The kingdom," according to legend, "where the faerie folk abandoned England, never to return.") Cyrus Barker, the series's diva detective, and his assistant, Thomas Llewelyn, who also serves as narrator, are working undercover at a high-stakes diplomatic meeting that the host, Lord Hargrave, attempts to camouflage as a house party. But on the very first night, Hargrave is shot dead by a sniper and a Sûreté agent with the French delegation is stabbed and thrown into the sea. When matters become really dire, the assembled guests decide to put on a show. ("It went rather well, considering the circumstances.") Thomas drops clever clues, and the setting is dramatic, but nothing beats the amateur entertainment organized by the guests, the murderer among them. EVERY ISLAND PARADISE has its resident eccentric. In Thomas Rydahl's first novel, THE HERMIT (Oneworld, $24.99), it's an OCtOgenarian Dane named Erhard, who has been living by himself for so long in the Canary Islands town of Puerto del Rosario that he's almost forgotten his native tongue. Erhard, who happens to be missing a finger, makes some money tuning pianos and driving a taxi. And when he comes across the mangled victim of a traffic accident, he snatches the man's detached finger for himself, a grim act that somehow "returns his balance to him." After a car is found on the beach with a dead baby in the back seat, the police bribe a young prostitute to play the troubled mother so they can close the case before the tourists get wind of it. But Erhard knows better, and he alone among his callous neighbors is determined to find the true killer. In K. E. Semmel's melancholy translation, this alienated old man proves to be a more complete human being than any of his 10-fingered friends.