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UNNATURAL DEATH

Formulaic, but there’s still enough for the loyalists. It’s a safe bet that Scarpetta will return.

Kay Scarpetta travels deep into rural Virginia to retrieve the bodies of two potential spies who have been savaged by a seemingly invisible assassin–or maybe it was Bigfoot?!

After a dismally busy Halloween night at Virginia’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, Scarpetta is preparing to join her niece, Secret Service agent Lucy Farinelli, to travel by helicopter to claim the bodies of Huck and Brittany Manson, owners of an outdoor gear store who are suspected of spying for the Russians and/or the Chinese. Much of the novel is taken up by this retrieval mission, relayed in typical Cornwell fashion with a great deal of detail and description about preparation and procedure. The Mansons’ bodies are ravaged, the campsite is destroyed, and the trail cameras the Secret Service hacked failed to capture the assailant. Investigator, staunch Scarpetta ally, and Bigfoot enthusiast Pete Marino is already on the ground and has taken a cast of an enormous footprint near one of the bodies. When they return to Richmond with the bodies for autopsy, Scarpetta faces off with a former employee who is seeking to discredit her. Her sense of unease about the situation grows when husband Benton Wesley, now advising the Secret Service, and a group of government officials insist on remotely observing the autopsy. She finds a micro hard drive embedded in Brittany’s hip, which seems to be what the murderer was seeking but failed to locate. It’s been more than 30 years since Scarpetta’s debut, and she’s still seeking dignity for the victims under her care while fighting against shadowy government forces and long-standing nemeses. The past several novels have re-introduced a foe previously presumed dead, and this one continues to leave that storyline wide open.

Formulaic, but there’s still enough for the loyalists. It’s a safe bet that Scarpetta will return.

Pub Date: Nov. 28, 2023

ISBN: 9781538743164

Page Count: 432

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023

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THE SILENT PATIENT

Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.

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A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.

"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.

Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Celadon Books

Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.

A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

Pub Date: March 17, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020

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