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Summary
Summary
A 16-year-old tennis star 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 start 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 a string of them as baffling or terrifying.
Summary
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. Fresh from her bruising battle with a psychopath in Florida, Scarpetta decides it's time for a change of pace. Moving to the historic city of Charleston, South Carolina, she opens a unique private forensic pathology practice, one in which she and her colleagues offer expert crime scene investigation and autopsies to communities lacking local access to competent death investigation and modern technology.
It seems an ideal situation, until the new battles start-with local politicians, with entrenched interests, with someone whose covert attempts at sabotage are clearly meant to run her out of town. And that's even before the murders and other violent deaths begin. A sixteen-year-old tennis star 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 start 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 a string of them as baffling, or as terrifying, as the ones facing her 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
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.
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.
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.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Rome. Water splashing. A gray mosaic tile tub sunk deep into a terracotta floor. Water pours slowly from an old brass spout, and darkness pours through a window. On the other side of old, wavy glass is the piazza, and the fountain, and the night. She sits quietly in water, and the water is very cold, with melting ice cubes in it, and there is little in her eyes--nothing much there anymore. At first, her eyes were like hands reaching out to him, begging him to save her. Now her eyes are the bruised blue of dusk. Whatever was in them has almost left. Soon she will sleep. "Here," he says, handing her a tumbler that was handblown in Murano and now is filled with vodka. He is fascinated by parts of her that have never seen the sun. They are pale like limestone, and he turns the spigot almost off, and the water is a trickle now, and he watches her rapid breathing and hears the chattering of her teeth. Her white breasts float beneath the surface of the water, delicate like white flowers. Her nipples, hard from the cold, are tight pink buds. Then he thinks of pencils. Of chewing off nubby pink erasers when he was in school, and telling his father and sometimes his mother that he didn't need erasers because he didn't make mistakes. When in truth, he liked to chew. He couldn't help it, and that also was the truth. "You'll remember my name," he says to her. "I won't," she says. "I can forget it." Chattering. He knows why she says it: If she forgets his name, her destiny will be rethought like a bad battle plan. "What is it?" he asks. "Tell me my name." "I don't remember." Crying, shaking. "Say it," he says, looking at her tan arms, pebbly with goose bumps, the blond hair on them erect, her young breasts and the darkness between her legs underwater. "Will." "And the rest of it?" "Rambo." "And you think that's amusing," he says, naked, sitting on the lid of the toilet. She shakes her head vigorously. Lying. She made fun of him when he told her his name. She laughed and said Rambo is make-believe, a movie name. He said it's Swedish. She said he isn't Swedish. He said the name is Swedish. Where did she think it came from? It's a real name. "Right," she said. "Like Rocky," she said, laughing. "Look it up on the Internet," he said. "It's a real name," he said, and he didn't like that he had to explain his name. This was two days ago, and he didn't hold it against her, but he was aware of it. He forgave her because despite what the world says, she suffers unbearably. "Knowing my name will be an echo," he says. "It makes no difference, not in the least. Just a sound already said." "I would never say it." Panic. Her lips and nails are blue, and she shivers uncontrollably. She stares. He tells her to drink more, and she doesn't dare refuse him. The slightest act of insubordination, and she knows what happens. Even one small scream, and she knows what happens. He sits calmly on the lid of the toilet, his legs splayed so she can see his excitement, and fear it. She doesn't beg anymore or tell him to have his way with her, if that's the reason she's his hostage. She doesn't say this anymore because she knows what happens when she insults him and implies that if he had a way it would be with her. Meaning she wouldn't give it willingly and want it. "You realize I asked you nicely," he says. "I don't know." Teeth chattering. "You do know. I asked you to thank me. That's all I asked, and I was nice to you. I asked you nicely, then you had to do this," he says. "You had to make me do this. You see"--he gets up and watches his nakedness in the mirror over the smooth marble sink--"your suffering makes me do this," his nakedness in the mirror says. "And I don't want to do this. So you've hurt me. Do you understand you've critically hurt me by making me do this?" his nakedness in the mirror says. She says she understands, and her eyes scatter like flying shards of glass as he opens the toolbox, and her scattered gaze fixes on the box cutters and knives and fine-tooth saws. He lifts out a small bag of sand and sets it on the edge of the sink. He pulls out ampules of lavender glue and sets them down, too. "I'll do anything you want. Give you anything you want." She has said this repeatedly. He has ordered her not to say it again. But she just did. His hands dip into the water, and the coldness of the water bites him, and he grabs her ankles and lifts her up. He holds her up by her cold, tan legs with their cold, white feet and feels her terror in her panicking muscles as he holds her cold ankles tight. He holds her a little longer than last time, and she struggles and flails and thrashes violently, cold water splashing loudly. He lets go. She gasps and coughs and makes strangling cries. She doesn't complain. She's learned not to complain--it took a while, but she's learned it. She's learned all of this is for her own good and is grateful for a sacrifice that will change his life--not hers, but his--in a way that isn't good. Wasn't good. Can never be good. She should be grateful for his gift. He picks up the trash bag he filled with ice from the ice maker in the bar and pours the last of it in the tub and she looks at him, tears running down her face. Grief. The dark edges of it showing. "We used to hang them from the ceiling over there," he says. "Kick them in the sides of their knees, over and over. Over there. All of us coming into the small room and kicking the sides of their knees. It's excruciatingly painful and, of course, crippling, and, of course, some of them died. That's nothing compared to other things I saw over there. I didn't work in that prison, you see. But I didn't need to, because there was plenty of that type of behavior to go around. What people don't understand is it wasn't stupid to film any of it. To photograph it. It was inevitable. You have to. If you don't, it's as if it never happened. So people take pictures. They show them to others. It only takes one. One person to see it. Then the whole world does." She glances at the camera on the marble-top table against the stucco wall. "They deserved it anyway, didn't they?" he says. "They forced us to be something we weren't, so whose fault was it? Not ours." She nods. She shivers, and her teeth chatter. "I didn't always participate," he says. "I did watch. At first it was difficult, perhaps traumatic. I was against it, but the things they did to us. And because of what they did, we were forced to do things back, so it was their fault that they forced us, and I know you see that." She nods and cries and shakes. "The roadside bombs. Kidnapping. Much more than you hear about," he says. "You get used to it. Just like you're getting used to the cold water, aren't you?" She isn't used to it, only numb and on her way to hypothermia. By now her head pounds and her heart feels as if it will explode. He hands her the vodka, and she drinks. "I'm going to open the window," he says. "So you can hear Bernini's fountain. I've heard it much of my life. The night's perfect. You should see the stars." He opens the window and looks at the night, the stars, the fountain of four rivers, and the piazza. Empty at this hour. "You won't scream," he says. She shakes her head and her chest heaves and she shivers uncontrollably. "You're thinking about your friends. I know that. Certainly they're thinking about you. That's too bad. And they aren't here. They aren't anywhere to be seen." He looks at the deserted piazza again and shrugs. "Why would they be here now? They've left. Long ago." Her nose runs and tears spill and she shakes. The energy in her eyes--it's not what it was when he met her, and he resents her for ruining who she was to him. Earlier, much earlier, he spoke Italian to her because it changed him into the stranger he needed to be. Now he speaks English because it no longer makes a difference. She glances at his excitement. Her glances at his excitement bounce against it like a moth against a lamp. He feels her there. She fears what's there. But not as much as she fears everything else--the water, the tools, the sand, the glue. She doesn't comprehend the thick black belt coiled on the very old tile floor, and she should fear it most of all. He picks it up and tells her it's a primitive urge to beat people who can't defend themselves. Why? She doesn't answer. Why? She stares at him in terror, and the light in her eyes is dull but crazed, like a mirror shattering right in front of him. He tells her to stand, and she does, shakily, her knees almost collapsing. She stands in the frigid water and he turns off the spout. Her body reminds him of a bow with a taut string because she's flexible and powerful. Water trickles down her skin as she stands before him. "Turn away from me," he says. "Don't worry. I'm not going to beat you with the belt. I don't do that." Water quietly laps in the tub as she turns away from him, facing old, cracked stucco and a closed shutter. "Now I need you to kneel in the water," he says. "And look at the wall. Don't look at me." She kneels, facing the wall, and he picks up the belt and slides the end of it through the buckle. Chapter 1 Ten days later. April 27, 2007. A Friday afternoon. Inside the virtual-reality theater are twelve of Italy's most powerful law enforcers and politicians, whose names, in the main, forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta can't keep straight. The only non-Italians are herself and forensic psychologist Benton Wesley, both consultants for International Investigative Response (IIR), a special branch of the European Network of Forensic Science Institutes (ENFSI). The Italian government is in a very delicate position. Nine days ago, American tennis star Drew Martin was murdered while on vacation, her nude, mutilated body found near Piazza Navona, in the heart of Rome's historic district. The case is an international sensation, details about the sixteen-year-old's life and death replayed nonstop on television, the crawls at the bottom of the screen doing just that--crawling by slowly and tenaciously, repeating the same details the anchors and experts are saying. "So, Dr. Scarpetta, let's clarify, because there seems to be much confusion. According to you, she was dead by two or three o'clock that afternoon," says Captain Ottorino Poma, a medico legale in the Arma dei Carabinieri, the military police heading the investigation. "That's not according to me," she says, her patience beginning to fray. "That's according to you." He frowns in the low lighting. "I was so sure it was you, just minutes ago, talking about her stomach contents and alcohol level. And the fact they indicate she was dead within hours of when she was seen last by her friends." "I didn't say she was dead by two or three o'clock. I believe it is you who continues to say that, Captain Poma." At a young age he already has a widespread reputation, and not an entirely good one. When Scarpetta first met him two years ago in the Hague at the ENFSI's annual meeting, he was derisively dubbed the Designer Doctor and described as extraordinarily conceited and argumentative. He is handsome--magnificent, really--with a taste for beautiful women and dazzling clothes, and today he is wearing a uniform of midnight blue with broad red stripes and bright silver embellishments, and polished black leather boots. When he swept into the theater this morning, he was wearing a red-lined cape. He sits directly in front of Scarpetta, front row center, and rarely takes his eyes off her. On his right is Benton Wesley, who is silent most of the time. Everyone is masked by stereoscopic glasses that are synchronized with the Crime Scene Analysis System, a brilliant innovation that has made the Polizia Scientifica Italiana's Unità per l'Analisi del Crimine Violento the envy of law enforcement agencies worldwide. "I suppose we need to go through this again so you completely understand my position," Scarpetta says to Captain Poma, who now rests his chin on his hand as if he is having an intimate conversation with her over a glass of wine. "Had she been killed at two or three o'clock that afternoon, then when her body was found at approximately eight-thirty the following morning, she would have been dead at least seventeen hours. Her livor mortis, rigor mortis, and algor mortis are inconsistent with that." She uses a laser pointer to direct attention to the three-dimensional muddy construction site projected on the wall-size screen. It's as if they are standing in the middle of the scene, staring at Drew Martin's mauled, dead body and the litter and earthmoving equipment around it. The red dot of the laser moves along the left shoulder, the left buttock, the left leg and its bare foot. The right buttock is gone, as is a portion of her right thigh, as if she had been attacked by a shark. Excerpted from Book of the Dead by Patricia Cornwell All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
