CARCASS TRADE

When she realizes that her brother Nate's missing ex-wife, Miranda, just might be the unidentified torso in an incinerated car found in Carbon Canyon, So-Cal copper Smokey Brandon (A World the Color of Salt, 1992) takes a giant step back from forensic investigations to return to her roots as an underage stripper and goes undercover as a lingerie model in Monty's Python, a biker bar run by the man who'd worked on Miranda's cycle. It sounds like fun until Monty takes Smokey to a hellacious biker rally where she sees a US Customs agent get his throat slit and realizes that Monty's pals really don't like undercover peepers. The bikers smuggle drugs and chemicals for drug processing, but the big prize they're willing to kill for—not only the corpse in Miranda's car and the hapless Customs agent, but a house painter strangled with a distinctive strand of wire Smokey's looking to match up—is pig semen: the climactic revelation in a wild ride that careens further and further out of control. Dirty Dancing with country music, scooter trash, gross-out autopsies, and all the raunchy bravado to prove that neither you nor Kay Scarpetta has half the cojones of Smokey Brandon.