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Kay Scarpetta has no doubts about her own abilities and affiliations. She is the head of a prestigious forensic lab in Boston affiliated with Harvard and MIT, an Air Force special reservist colonel working with the Department of Defense, and a lawyer. Her credentials are impeccable, but the people she works with are becoming difficult. This latest medical thriller by Patricia Cornwell concerns the aftermath of a murder that occurred six months in the past. Scarpetta's sometime partner Jack Fielding was killed by his maniacal daughter Dawn Kincaid. Dawn then attempted to murder Scarpetta. At the age of 12, Jack had been subjected to abuse by Kathleen Lawler, a social worker who was supposed to be helping him. Lawler became pregnant with his child and gave birth to Dawn while incarcerated for this abuse. As Scarpetta is preparing to be a witness against Dawn, she is summoned down to a women's prison near Savannah to meet with Lawler, now imprisoned on other charges. While there, Scarpetta is confronted with some mysterious cases by her investigator, Pete Marino, and NYC prosecutor Jaime Berger. Berger was once a close friend but now seems to have her own agenda for Scarpetta. Jaime is trying to free a woman, Lola Daggette, who she believes was wrongfully accused of gruesome murders over a decade ago. A wealthy doctor and his family were murdered in a blood bath. Lola, a mildly retarded drug-addict, was discovered washing blood from her clothes in her halfway house and the police believed they had found their culprit. Now Lola is set to be put to death and DNA evidence may point to her innocence. The Georgia women's prison where she is being held, presided over by the aptly named warden Tara Grimm, is a strange place. Convicted murderers seem to die there under unusual circumstances. Bit by bit, Scarpetta must piece together the disparate parts of the puzzles surrounding their deaths. There is a lot going on in this book to keep the reader engaged. Jaime is the ex-lover of Scarpetta's niece Lucy, and the emotional entanglements are intriguing. People are dying in agony all over the country and Scarpetta must find the cause of these deaths and how they are connected. However, few of the characters, except for Scarpetta and perhaps Marino, are fully fleshed out. The only thing we learn about Scarpetta's husband Benton is that he is supportive and an FBI agent. He may be familiar to readers who have read previous Scarpetta novels, but that does not help the new reader to this series. The plot too disappoints in the resolution. Too much information is reserved for the end without enough development to make the ending seem plausible. Anne Corey is a writer, poet, teacher and botanical artist in New York's Hudson Valley.
Reviewed by Anne Corey, November 2011
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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