Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
---|---|---|
Searching... Park Grove Library (Cottage Grove) | MYSTERY COR | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | MYSTERY COR | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Stillwater Public Library | MYSTERY COR | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
"We enter The Last Precinct through the reverberating aftershocks of Black Notice, inconceivably finding Virginia's Chief Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta an object of suspicion - and criminal investigation. And the nightmare perpetuated on Scarpetta's doorstep continues as she discovers that the so-called Werewolf murders may have extended to New York City and into the darkest corners of her past. When a formidable prosecutor, a female assistant district attorney from New York, is brought into the case, Scarpetta must struggle to make what she knows to be the truth prevail against mounting and unnerving evidence to the contrary. Tested in every way, she turns inward to ask, Where do you go when there is nowhere left? The answer is the Last Precinct. By the end of the novel, it is clear that Scarpetta's life can never be the same."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
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
"My central nervous system spikes and surges, my pulse pounds. I am sweating.... " If only readers would share this response with Cornwell's immensely popular Kay Scarpetta, Virginia's chief medical examiner. But most won't. Kay has plenty of reason to be upset. She's standing in a room in a shabby motel where a body has been found, severely tortured. She's under official suspicion of having murdered maleficent ber-cop Diane Bray (in Kay's last outing, Black Notice). She's suspected of trumping up charges against accused serial killer Jean-Baptiste Chandonne, also introduced in Black Notice. She's reeling from the aftershock of Chandonne's murderous attack on her; she mightily misses her slain FBI agent/lover Dan Belson; she's learned that her gay niece, Lucy, is quitting law enforcement for a private PI firm called the Last PrecinctÄand it's Christmas time. Kay has a lot of support in the midst of this law-and-disorder soap opera, from, among others, Lucy, tough cop/sidekick Pete Marino and Kay's aged friend, psychiatrist Anna ZennerÄand that's part of the problem with this novel. Excessive emoting and way too much talk (including long therapeutic sessions between Kay and Anna) derail momentum time and again; the pages feel soggy with tears. Cornwell does provide intense intrigue, but it's a strain to follow as she connects events and loose ends from several novels. Within this narrative swamp, there's one new and very memorable gator, thoughÄNew York prosecutor Jaime Berger, obviously modeled on real-life ADA (and novelist) Linda Fairstein, to whom Cornwell dedicates the novel; she's sharply drawn and charismatic. Cornwell will win few if any new fans with this overlong, sluggish offering, but her giant readership is so hardcore and so enamored of Kay that the publisher's first printing of one million seems, if anything, conservative. $800,000 ad/promo; Literary Guild, Mystery Guild and Doubleday Book Club main selections; national satellite tour; foreign rights sold in the U.K., Germany, Italy, France, Holland, Japan, Finland, Turkey and Spain. (One-day laydown, Oct. 16) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Cornwell continues the story she told in Black Notice (1999), picking it up only moments after the bizarrely deformed Jean-Baptiste Chardonne has been captured on the lawn of Virginia medical examiner Kay Scarpetta's home. But don't look for quick action or expect the loose ends in the previous book to be cleared up anytime soon. There's soul-searching and rehashing to get through before things take off. When that happens, however, readers will find plenty to keep them occupied: the chain of events leading to the death of Scarpetta's lover, Benton Wesley, is untangled; Scarpetta is accused of a brutal murder; and the mystery surrounding the powerful French Chardonne crime family deepens. Cornwell flavors the goings-on with the usual gruesome forensic detail, and familiar characters, such as loudmouth cop Pete Marino and Kay's volatile niece, Lucy, are around to give Kay a hand. New to this novel is attorney Jaime Berger, who opens the way for the next book: Kay will be traveling to New York City, where Lucy has joined a private investigation firm known as, you guessed it, the Last Precinct. There are some gripping scenes but also a lot of overblown angst and annoyingly complicated plotting that too often get in the way of the excitement. Only for die-hard Scarpetta fans, of whom there are many. ^-Stephanie Zvirin
Kirkus Review
What could be more open and shut than a case in which a widely sought killer tricks his way into the home of Virginia's Chief Medical Examiner, attacks her with a hammer of exactly the same sort he'd used in killing Richmond Deputy Police Chief Diane Bray, and is still on the scene when police arrive? But when Dr. Kay Scarpetta, the intended victim of notorious Jean-Baptiste Chandonne, hears the statement the suspect (dubbed Le Loup-Garou, the Werewolf, for the fine, undisguisable hair covering his entire body) has given the police, she realizes that despite her obvious suffering and terror, attested by the elbow she broke just after throwing some providential formalin into her assailant's eyes, the case boils down to her word against his. As she and her embattled loyalists--ATF niece Lucy Farinelli; neanderthal Richmond Police Captain Pete Marino; New York sex crimes ADA Jaime Berger--toil to link Chandonne's current murder spree first to the killing of a Big Apple weathercaster two years ago, then to the execution of Scarpetta's FBI lover Benton Wesley, the news gets steadily worse until Scarpetta finds herself entering a grand jury chamber not as an expert witness but as a homicide suspect. The same bureaucratic paranoia, the same grinding intensity, the same trademark down-and-dirty forensics as Black Notice (1999). This time, though, the obsessive revisiting of earlier horrors has a soap-opera sameness, as if Cornwell kept painting her heroine's ongoing struggles in darker and darker colors because she couldn't bear to let anything go. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
The Last Precinct, Cornwell's 11th novel featuring Dr. Kay Scarpetta, is really Part 2 of Black Notice (LJ 7/99), her previous work in this series. The story opens on the night following a vicious attack on Scarpetta by Le Loup Garou (the Werewolf). As she recovers from her injuries, Scarpetta begins another healing process as well by beginning to deal with her past, examine her present life, and contemplate a career change. As always, bodies are delivered to the morgue, and as Scarpetta unravels the mysteries of their deaths, she begins to suspect a connection between a few of her patients and the Chandonne crime family, of which Le Loup Garou is a member. This may be Cornwell's least action-oriented, most reflective work featuring Scarpetta. Readers unfamiliar with the series may find it confusing, but fans will want to read it. Recommended for all public libraries and popular reading collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/00.]DLeslie Madden, Georgia Inst. of Technology, Atlanta (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.