Red Mist

November 14, 2011
The aftermath of the bloodshed in 2010’s Port Mortuary figures heavily in bestseller Cornwell’s solid if scattered 19th thriller featuring medical examiner Kay Scarpetta. Lured from her home in Cambridge, Mass., to Savannah, Ga., to visit Kathleen Lawler—the woman who molested Scarpetta’s recently murdered colleague, Jack Fielding, as a child and later bore their daughter—at the Georgia Prison for Women, Scarpetta angrily realizes that she’s been tricked. Ex-Manhattan ADA Jaime Berger wants Scarpetta’s help exonerating a woman on death row for the murder nine years earlier of Savannah’s Dr. Clarence Jordan and his family. What first seems like a cold case becomes terrifyingly current when fresh bodies start appearing. Scarpetta begins questioning whether the Jordan family slaying is linked to the murders in Massachusetts in Mortuary at the hands of Dawn Kincaid, the brilliant psychopath daughter of Lawler and Fielding. As in other recent work, Cornwell overloads the plot, but Scarpetta’s tangled emotional state and her top-notch forensic knowledge more than compensate. Author tour. Agent: Esther Newberg at ICM.

December 1, 2011
Yet another demonstration that the murderous enemies of forensic pathologist Dr. Kay Scarpetta aren't neutralized by life imprisonment or death. Especially not death. After Dawn Kincaid was jailed for attacking Scarpetta in her own garage and nearly killing her, you'd think she'd be out of the picture. No such luck: Claiming self-defense, she's commenced legal action against Scarpetta for attempted murder. Meanwhile, Kathleen Lawler, the mother who conceived Dawn by seducing 12-year-old Jack Fielding, Scarpetta's late assistant, has invited Scarpetta to the Georgia Prison for Women, where she's serving 10 years for DUI manslaughter, to chat. Their talk, like much of this tale's overextended first half, is creepy but inconclusive, and Scarpetta comes away wondering what she's gotten into this time—or what she failed to get out of last time (Port Mortuary, 2010, etc.). The pivotal figures turn out to be two women who never appear: Lola Daggette, GPFW's celebrity inmate, who maintains her innocence even though she's doing life for the slaughter of Savannah physician Clarence Jordan and his family, and Barrie Lou Rivers, the Deli Devil who fed arsenic to 17 patrons of her sandwich stand, 9 of them fatally, then choked to death in her cell hours before her date with the executioner's needle. Working with her usual posse—her husband, profiler Benton Wesley; her hot-tempered investigator Pete Marino; and her niece Lucy, whose latest dead lover, Manhattan Sex Crimes prosecutor Jaime Berger, gives her a personal stake in the case—Scarpetta, working feverishly in the story's much more rewarding second half, unearths the connections among a series of conveniently timed suicides in GPFW. She may even close the books on this set of monsters for good. Cornwell at her worst, Cornwell at her best, but mainly Cornwell at her most.

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July 1, 2011

Kay Scarpetta's former deputy chief, Jack Fielding, has been murdered, and she wants to know why. So she heads to the Georgia Prison for Women, where an inmate claims to have information. Soon she's uncovering initially inexplicable links to the murder of an Atlanta family, the deaths of homeless people in California, and more. Scarpetta's on the loose again; hope this one has real luster.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2011
Over the course of the Scarpetta series, Cornwell has taken her heroine from the Richmond, Virginia, medical examiner's office to Massachusetts' cutting-edge Cambridge Forensic Center. As the nineteenth Scarpetta novel opens, she is in a rented car on her way to the Georgia Prison for Women, where she's going to meet with inmate Kathleen Lawler, the mother of the woman who murdered Scarpetta's colleague, Jack Fielding (familiarity with the previous book in the series, Port Mortuary, 2010, would be helpful here). But Scarpetta doesn't anticipate walking into an elaborateif rather unnecessarily labyrinthineconspiracy involving several seemingly unrelated murders that may be connected to the events surrounding Fielding's death. It's a good novel, better than Port Mortuary (which was, in turn, better than many recent Scarpetta outings), but it's still a long way from the quality of the early novels that put Cornwell on the map, e.g., Postmortem (1990) and The Body Farm (1994). Longtime series fans will definitely be intrigued: the book answers several questions raised in previous recent books, and it certainly feels like another step on the road back to prime form for the authoralthough, that said, it should also be noted that, as a first-person narrator (a recent switch in approach), Scarpetta is still finding her voice. Expect rough patches of exposition. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The unevenness of the Kay Scarpetta series has never deterred Cornwell's legion of fans, and it won't bother them this time, either, especially as the author seems to be rounding back into top form.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)