Black Notice (Scarpetta)

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Plot - 1/2/5 : Good start, but disappointing finish. Kay and Marino come together to solve the mystry behind a unidentified body found in a container, which leads them to France to unreveal a horrible serial killer who calls himself Le Loug Garou - The Werewolf. Kay is again put down when she choses to flirt and Lucy irritates me that i feel I have reached my limit. And the way Marino is treated shows clearly that the series has started to sink.

During her childhood, Patricia suffered extensive emotional abuse.In an interview where she was asked why she is focusing on psychopaths in her books, the author mentioned it’s because she “grew up with terrible fear.” After her father left the family on a Christmas day when Patricia was only 5 years old, she was also molested by a convicted pedophile. Unfortunately, these situations are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Before she can finish the autopsy on “Container Man,” Kay discovers that her grief-driven blinders have hidden from her several very serious problems that have occurred over the last few weeks in her own office. One is the almost daily theft of everything from cell phones to paper clips from the more open areas of the Medical Examiner’s Office. Everyone who has read “Point of Origin” knows that both Marino and Lucy disappeared for the entire day on which the remnants of Benton’s “body” were found. Every reader knows that Benton deliberately avoided Kay before all three went off the grid. Some of the articles she wrote on prostitution and crime in the downtown Charlotte area brought her a lot of attention, praise, and respect, and this is when she received her first award, the North Carolina Press Association’s Investigative Reporting Award. Lucy has turned gun happy & willing to kill every bad man she thinks she sees. Marino is balled up in knots in regards to Benton.Thirdly, the four-months new Deputy Chief, Diane Bray, arrives on scene, oozing power, seduction and entitlement with every step, the epitome of sexual harassment and bullying in the workplace. Bray makes it clear to Kay that she is responsible for the new protocols at the crime scene and that she has deliberately reassigned Marino so as to break up the professional relationship between Marino and Kay. And Bray goads her about Benton’s death. As predicted, now that Cornwell "killed" off Benton, he's suddenly much more beloved and gets more space. Kay is exactly the same, but her frequent crying and "feeling depressed" is now attributed to his loss (I will never ever buy another so I skimmed wikipedia with one eye - I'll never get to see his resurrection and omg engagement). Lucy is exactly the same, ie. not really there except in illogical bits of annoying-her-aunt (her relationship with Marino would have been the only interesting one but, as usual, off-screen). Her first novel, Postmortem, was written during this time, and while initially it was not successfully received, it was eventually published, and it became the first book in her popular crime series. This basically launched her writing career.The author is living in Boston where she is working on her next book. In another storyline, her niece Lucy hasn't found a way to grieve Benton's death either and is courting danger as she usually turns to violence to solve problems. And if that weren't enough, a sexy-looking cop with connections is taking over the police department and threatening to take over the medical examiner's office as well. Her name is Bray, and she's determined to get rid of both Marino and Scarpetta. You can imagine, if you're familiar with the character, how Marino reacts to this. Not many people know, but the author of the popular dr. Kay Scarpetta novels has also written a couple of non-fiction books, among them also being two foodie books as well – and they’re great too!

For the third book in a row, Cornwell intimates that Benton’s death would be more accurately described with quotation marks around the word, that something is seriously amiss despite the autopsy report. While the behavioral symptoms expressed by Kay are primarily those of grief, the behaviors exhibited by Marino and Lucy are more exactly attributed to guilt, to the keeping of secrets. And those secrets are eating them alive. In her book Depraved Heart, she made sure to point out just how useless the FBI is at times since they want to get people even when they are completely innocent. This was something like a literary revenge for what she had to endure at the hands of the FBI during that fateful year. Patricia Cornwell Awards and NominationsLe Loup Garou – French for The Werewolf, he was the elder brother of Thomas Chandonne, but all his life, he was never exposed to the outside world, for fear of humiliating the Chandonne Crime Family. He had a deformed face, with baby hair, about seven to nine inches long, all over his body. He bathes at the river in both France and Richmond almost every night, in the futile hopes that the water from the rivers may cure him. He was blinded by Formalin during a struggle with Scarpetta. Lucy dates Jo now and they are also partners, Lucy f's up a shooting and blames herself and turns to drinking after a long time sober.

Thankfully nothing really bad happened, but it was enough to shake her to the core. When her brother appeared on his bicycle, the guy was trying to take Patricia to his car, which would have most likely ended up in her death. In a sleepy seaside town outside Copenhagen, a strange light at the bottom of the harbour has the police call in a military diver with a speciality in wet crime scenes. Deep down in the dark water sits a car, with the dead body of a young woman in the driver’s seat. The dead woman seems to have been the victim of a sadistic surgery. Postmortem, published in 1990, is, I think, also her most popular book as well. It is really the book that started a new trend with CSI-style novels – forensic anthropology mystery books involved in solving brutal murders, and serial killer cases, all that would take the fiction genre by storm. The autopsy performed by Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta initially reveals neither a cause of death nor an identification. But the victim's personal effects and an odd tattoo take Scarpetta on a hunt for information that leads to INTERPOL's headquarters in Lyon, France, where she receives critical instructions: go to the Paris morgue to receive forbidden, secret evidence and then return to Virginia to carry out a mission. It is a mission that could ruin her career. The French serial killer is high class and is kept a secret by his family. He has a rare illness where his face is deformed and he has hair growing on him. So he calls himself the werewolf. He ends up at Scarpetta's and in the end Lucy ends up pointing a gun at him but Kay talks her out of shooting him.Kay Scarpetta has not handled Benton Wesley’s death well. She has worked herself into the ground. She has distanced herself from her friends and employees. She has even started smoking again. She is mired in guilt and regret over every unkind word she ever spoke to Benton. No, Kay Scarpetta is not handling her grief well at all.

Books of the first stripe have always been the most interesting to me, so much so that it's been tolerable / interesting when they stray into the second area. While I completely understand that there's an appreciative audience for the third kind, they leave me cold: Scarpetta is a deeply unpleasant person, and so is her best friend, Pete Marino, and it turns out that the niece she raised as her own daughter is likewise terrible. This book was exactly what I needed. Mystery.. excitement..suspense. I was sitting on the edge of my seat speculating most of the time. I didn't want to put it down. It was not boring in the least! After leaving her job as a journalist behind, in 1985 she started working with the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of Virginia, where she stayed for six years. This is the very place that her fictional character, dr. Kay Scarpetta, would work in as well. If you ever want a prime example of a book series that has taken a sharp nosedive in quality, this is the one.

Success!

Thomas Chandonne – Son of a powerful, rich family in Paris. He was found in a container at a port in Richmond. Heavily decomposed, his cause of death undetermined. All conversations are monologues of people talking apart from each other, which sadly does not seem to be an intentianal post-p-p-modern statement since Cornwell has never managed dialogue, though if she enhances her incompetences to make them work for her, I guess one has to give her cudos, just don't think the target audience (see above) even recognises that.