Book of the Dead

After about 6 of her novels, I swore that I would never buy another Cornwell book again. Yet when the author herself described this as her worst novel yet, I could not resist, and yup, I bought it. She did not exaggerate; if anything she was overly positive about the book. Endless nagging conversations over troubled relationships, flat predictable characters recycled from past novels, and a minimum of text devoted to the mystery itself make this, sans doute, the most profoundly unreadable book yet in the series. I strongly recommend avoiding it. In a recent interview Ms. Cornwell promised to do better.

I thought Predator was bad. This book reaches new lows. Cornwell\’s characters are, if anything, more disturbed and obnoxious than ever. I want to smack Lucy, shoot Marino, and shake Kay till her teeth rattle. Murders are thrown in willy-nilly, almost as if she ran out of plot so she introduced another one but not in any sort of chronological order. The parts written from the killer\’s perspective are so confuddled you don\’t know which murder he\’s committing, or why, and you don\’t really care. Plenty of extraneous characters who contribute nothing to the plot. The return of the god-awful Dr. Self – could we just murder her already? And a new annoying device – instead of telling us how the investigation proceeds, she has two characters talk about it, after the fact, in dialogue that goes on for so many pages, with so few identifying marks that you lose track of who\’s supposed to be talking. Cornwell used to be a great author, and I loved her earlier books. But she seems to have developed an intense hatred for her own characters, which makes her books increasingly painful to read.

I liked the Kay Scarpetta series back when the first few books came out, and then I lost interest in the late \’90s. Thanks to this coming across my BookBub list, I spent two bucks and three hours reminding myself why I am no longer a Cornwell fangirl. Although more or less competently written (though the repeated iteration of \”Let\’s don\’t do this\” was driving me up the wall), this book is ten different kinds of a mess. There\’s no mystery here; it\’s an awkward amalgam of forensic science (interesting, I guess, but with no real human element), a poem to Rome, a Dear John letter to Charleston, and some annoying pseudopsychology around death, assault, and avoidant attachment styles…with a big dollop of gardening advice. Although the murderer is described as having meaningful rituals, once he\’s revealed, the meaning of these rituals is inadequately explained. The reader knows pretty much from the second chapter who he is, so there\’s very little suspense. There\’s a small bit of interest in the character of manipulative pop psychologist Dr. Marilyn Self, who appears to function as Kay Scarpetta\’s externalized shadow side. The novelty of this wears off in about five minutes, however, leaving the character overly obvious, lacking in nuance. Recommended for people fascinated by gunshot residue, and those who still share the author\’s patently obvious fascination with the character of Scarpetta. This is perhaps less a novel than it is the author\’s own extended autoerotic fantasy, so if convoluted psychological voyeurism is your thing, this is the book for you.

But I know better now. This story was absolutely horrible, and if it were possible I’d give it a slew of negative stars. I liked the beginning stories in this series, but it’s been a while since I’ve read one and I’d forgotten how they get so much worse as the series progresses. Not only are the bad guys seriously disturbed and dysfunctional, which you expect, but the main characters are too, which you don’t. They started out with problems like everyone has, then as the series grew everyone seemed to turn amoral. There’s only one person in this story that was happy, and she should have gotten what was coming to her. It was all very depressing, and I have to say that I feel sorry for an author that has this kind of stuff running through her brain. It makes you wonder. On top of the garbage I forced myself to wade through, it ended on a cliffhanger regarding Marino. And now that I think of it, probably Self too. I am so way past peeved that I need to find a GOOD book to clean my brain out. This one is going into the delete from my account folder.

I started with Kay Scarpetta way back in the days of Postmortem, and this novel is AWFUL, Cornwell\’s worst by far. The mark of a wise writer is to quit before the plots become convoluted and characters become irrelevant.

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