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Summary
Summary
As the chief of the new Cambridge Forensic Center in Massachusetts, a joint venture of the state and federal governments and MIT, and Harvard, Scarpetta is confronted with a case that could shut down her new facility and ruin her personally and professionally. A young man drops dead, but when his body is examined the next morning, there are stunning indications that he may have been alive when he was zipped inside a pouch and locked inside the Center's cooler.
Summary
At the beginning of her professional career, when she accepted a scholarship from the Air Force to pay off her medical school debt, Scarpetta found herself ensnared in a gruesome case of hate crimes against two Americans in South Africa. Now, more than twenty years later, her secret military ties have drawn her to Dover Air Force Base, where she has been immersed in a training fellowship to master the art of CT-assisted virtual autopsy a procedure the White House has mandated that she introduce into the private sector.
As the chief of the new Cambridge Forensic Center in Massachusetts, a joint venture of the state and federal governments and MIT, and Harvard, Scarpetta is confronted with a case that could shut down her new facility and ruin her personally and professionally. A young man drops dead, but when his body is examined the next morning, there are stunning indications that he may have been alive when he was zipped inside a pouch and locked inside the Center s cooler. When 3-D radiology scans reveal more shocking details about internal injuries ones that suggest the possibility of a conspiracy to cause mass casualties Scarpetta realizes that she is fighting a cunning, cruel, and invisible enemy. Now it is a race against time to discover who and why before more people die."
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 (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Bestseller Cornwell's compelling 18th Kay Scarpetta novel (after The Scarpetta Factor), her strongest work in years, involves the chief medical examiner in a case that's both far-reaching in its national security implications and deeply personal. The story begins at the real Port Mortuary at Dover Air Force Base, where Scarpetta is assisting in developing techniques for virtual autopsies, then shifts back to her recently adopted home at Boston's Cambridge Forensic Center (CFC). A young man's mysterious death becomes even stranger after full-body scans reveal destruction so extensive it's as if a bomb went off inside his body. Scarpetta and husband Benton Wesley-along with her niece, Lucy Farinelli, and ex-cop turned CFC investigator Pete Marino-discover links not only to a government project with the ability to cause mass casualties but also to another grisly case currently under investigation. As Scarpetta's military past rears its head, the emotional damage the investigation of the cases is bound to wreak on Cornwell's steadfast heroine will leave readers eager for the next installment. Long-time fans will welcome the return after a decade to a first-person narration with direct access to Scarpetta's thoughts. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Cornwell returns to form somewhat after the plodding Scarpetta Factor (2009). Told in the first person, the story finds Kay Scarpetta, now the chief medical examiner of the new Cambridge Forensic Center in Massachusetts, involved in a couple of cases: the mysterious sudden death of a man and the murder of a child (whose confessed killer seems to be innocent). Soon she begins to suspect the two cases are related joined by a piece of high-tech hardware found in the first victim's apartment and before too long, she realizes she's facing what could be her most clever foe yet. For the first time in a while, Cornwell seems genuinely interested in Scarpetta again, giving the novel that spark of life that has made the series so enjoyable for its many fans. The book is still a long way from the glory days of Postmortem (1991) and From Potter's Field (1995), but it's definitely a step in the right direction. Series fans who have felt a bit let down of late will be pleased. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Print, radio, television, in-person, billboards, Twitter, Facebook, iPhone apps about the only thing Putnam isn't doing to promote Cornwell's latest is a graffiti campaign.--Pitt, David Copyright 2010 Booklist
Kirkus Review
Quite a homecoming for Dr. Kay Scarpetta after her six months at Dover Air Force Basea corpse back in Cambridge that seems to have been locked away in a mortuary still alive.The man who died a block from Scarpetta's home in Norton's Woods is surrounded by mystery. No one knows his name, how he was killed, whether he died of natural causes or who installed the tiny audio receivers in his headphones and why. The most baffling mystery, however, is why, after collapsing and dying without shedding a drop of blood, he began to bleed hours after being placed in a drawer at the Cambridge Forensic Center. The answer to this riddle, which will plunge Scarpetta up to her elbows in another memorable postmortem investigation, will connect the unknown man to two other murder victimsa star college quarterback and a 6-year-old boyand to three recent victims of roadside Afghanistan bombs whose memory she thought she'd left behind in Dover. And the connection, some wickedly cutting-edge work in robotics and nanotechnology, gives Scarpetta the chance to interrupt her ongoing quarrels with her posseher anti-authority niece Lucy, her ex-profiler husband Benton Wesley, her investigator Pete Marinoand show how much she knows about absolutely everything."While this is a work of fiction, it is not science fiction," Cornwell announces in a preliminary note. Well, maybe. Though it has little feeling for its new characters and shows the regulars wallowing in complications instead of developing them, there's less of the fulsome self-mythologizing that drove The Scarpetta Factor (2009).]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Cornwell's 18th Kay Scarpetta title, following The Scarpetta Factor (2009); simultaneous release with the Putnam hc (1.2 million-copy first printing); narrated for BOT by Kate Reading (Kate Burton reads the Penguin Audio edition). (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
