Black Notice (Scarpetta)

Product Information

Heroine - 2/5 : Kay Scarpetta. She thinks she can do anything and cryout. Just wanted to say that it does not work all the time. I remember in the middle of the series, I really felt for her. Now she has really turned into some stranger to me. Shifts in narrative, from first person to third person, from book to book, didn’t work and were jarring. She stretched plotlines and subplot lines over books and then wrapped them up in the most head scratching perfunctory way. 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. Patricia Cornwell sold her first novel, Postmortem, in 1990 while working as a computer analyst at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Richmond, Virginia. Postmortem, was the first bona fide forensic thriller. It paved the way for an explosion of entertainment featuring in all things forensic across film, television and literature.

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 one positive constant throughout the books is the character of Marino, a police officer who is mixture of a drunken circus bear, Archie Bunker and Columbo. This guy is about as un-PC as a character can get and breathes a little corrosive energy into the stale air of the later series. 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. 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. 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.

She also created two additional crime series focusing on Andy Brazil, a young journalist turned cop in Virginia, as well as another series with center stage taken by Win Garano in Boston. The author’s latest series, Captain Chase, features the main character as a NASA pilot, quantum physicist, and cybercrime investigator. That said, with the book before this, Point of Origin, there's at least some hint that Scarpetta's starting to understand the impact of keeping her sense of moral indignation running on high, 24 / 7: "You're awfully straight and narrow, aren't you, Kay?" McGovern stated. "Unlike the rest of us, you never seem to use poor judgment or do anything wrong. You probably never overeat or get drunk. And to be honest, it makes the rest of us schleps feel afraid to be around you, afraid you'll look at us and disapprove." Elegant, trumpet-like lilies, she thought. But there was something off. Something not right. It was the colour. It was strange, sort of pale and flesh-coloured…

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. Kay Scarpetta is the chief coroner for some place, somewhere in Virginia and consequently sees her share of unusual murders that need to be solved. The early books were clever variations on the procedural genre and are entertaining reading. Then things went south.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.

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. Cornwell received widespread attention and praise for her series of articles on prostitution and crime in downtown Charlotte. From the Charlotte Observer, Cornwell moved to a job with the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of Virginia – a post she would later bestow upon the fictional Kay Scarpetta. After the ending of her first marriage, in 2005 Cornwell married Stacy Ann Gruber, a psychiatry professor at Harvard, with whom she lives in Boston, Massachusetts. My friend periodically gives me bags full of books she's read and I found this one in the last batch. It's been ages since I've read a Cornwell/Dr. Scarpetta book, just long enough for me to miss them and really enjoy this one. Everyone is out to harrass and hurt dear Kay, as usual, until in the end she calls in a few favours of her thousands of powerful friends that come out of nowhere, just like the many luxury items she buys in some limbo time. I've tried hard to stop rereading paragraphs to make sense of mistakes, not just in missing sentences or information, but also in contradicting descriptions of place, all the more annoying because detailing every move always made up most of Cornwell's novels. She still phones up a French restaurant owner at home instead of googling a word, so it's no surprise she skips over to Europe for a bit again.

Over the years, the author sold over 100 million books all over the world and her novels were translated into close to 40 languages. An interesting side note is that the author appeared as herself on TV in one of the Criminal Minds episodes, “True Genius.” 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. Comments : Needs some good solid characters, some new and comical ones then and there, just to bring down the very dark atmosphere ! 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. 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.