Review by New York Times Review
AS A WORLD-RENOWNED forensic pathologist, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, the iron-willed protagonist of Patricia Cornwell's insanely popular procedural mysteries, is often called out of town for high-level professional consultations. That pattern is relaxed in CHAOS (Morrow/HarperCollins, $28.99), which finds Scarpetta at home with her husband, Benton Wesley, a criminal-intelligence agent for the F.B.I., and taking care of business as director of the Cambridge Forensic Center. Although she's hardly a lyrical writer, Cornwell allows her heroine a rare opportunity to express her affection for Boston, and especially for her favorite park along the Charles River. "I've been here many times," Scarpetta says, with some warmth, recalling hikes with Benton from their home near the Harvard campus in the "sublime" New England weather of the spring and fall. It doesn't seem fair, then, when a fresh-faced young woman with a British accent - someone Scarpetta and her husband had encountered earlier that day as she rode a bicycle through Cambridge - is found dead on the fitness path along the river. Because Boston is baking in a terrible heat wave, everything seems to be moving more slowly, so it takes half the book to set up a tent to secure the crime scene and allow Scarpetta to examine the corpse. "I'm getting more frustrated with each minute that passes," she fumes. "The body should be in the C.T. scanner. I should be setting up my autopsy station." Cornwell's readers should be able to relate to that. Not only is the autopsy a long time coming, it's less than interesting when Scarpetta finally gets around to it. Surprisingly, the young victim was zapped by a freak electrical charge - the same cause of death, it turns out, that claimed an Army general at the very same time, but hundreds of miles away. The possibility of "weaponized electricity" is the signal for the F.B.I. to step in, entering a plot that features a cyberstalker, a psycho from a previous book; Scarpetta's annoying sister, Dorothy; and Dorothy's brilliant, if seriously disturbed daughter, Lucy. Not one of them is dead and in need of an autopsy, which is a waste of Scarpetta's peculiar talents - and our time. AN ACT OF terrorism is unnerving in itself, but when this sort of violence takes the lives of children, rumblings of vigilante justice are often heard. That's the chaotic scene that greets Chief Inspector Bish Ortley in Melina Marchetta's TELL THE TRUTH, SHAME THE DEVIL (Mulholland/Little, Brown, $26) when he arrives in Calais to retrieve his daughter from a student tour of Normandy that ended abruptly when her bus was bombed and two people died. The French police are quick to suspect yet another student, Violette LeBrac Zidane, who comes from a family of terrorists. Marchetta, who has written several young adult novels, seems to have inside knowledge of the mysterious processes of the teenage brain. A busload of quarrelsome, immature adolescents doesn't daunt her in the least. Although they represent a bubbling melting pot of ethnicities, some with underlying political tensions, her young characters all stand out as individuals. Even at their most infuriating, they're always believable, if not as sympathetic as Bish Ortley, who carries a load of domestic problems on his shoulders. "There's something about him," Marchetta tells us. "The bloodshot eyes and sad teddy bear look. This man comes with a story." In HELL BAY (Minotaur, $25.99), Will Thomas puts a shrewd spin on the country house mystery by converting the traditional manor to a castle and shifting it to a remote location in the Isles of Scilly. ("The kingdom," according to legend, "where the faerie folk abandoned England, never to return.") Cyrus Barker, the series's diva detective, and his assistant, Thomas Llewelyn, who also serves as narrator, are working undercover at a high-stakes diplomatic meeting that the host, Lord Hargrave, attempts to camouflage as a house party. But on the very first night, Hargrave is shot dead by a sniper and a Sûreté agent with the French delegation is stabbed and thrown into the sea. When matters become really dire, the assembled guests decide to put on a show. ("It went rather well, considering the circumstances.") Thomas drops clever clues, and the setting is dramatic, but nothing beats the amateur entertainment organized by the guests, the murderer among them. EVERY ISLAND PARADISE has its resident eccentric. In Thomas Rydahl's first novel, THE HERMIT (Oneworld, $24.99), it's an OCtOgenarian Dane named Erhard, who has been living by himself for so long in the Canary Islands town of Puerto del Rosario that he's almost forgotten his native tongue. Erhard, who happens to be missing a finger, makes some money tuning pianos and driving a taxi. And when he comes across the mangled victim of a traffic accident, he snatches the man's detached finger for himself, a grim act that somehow "returns his balance to him." After a car is found on the beach with a dead baby in the back seat, the police bribe a young prostitute to play the troubled mother so they can close the case before the tourists get wind of it. But Erhard knows better, and he alone among his callous neighbors is determined to find the true killer. In K. E. Semmel's melancholy translation, this alienated old man proves to be a more complete human being than any of his 10-fingered friends.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 13, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
Chaos is Cornwell's twenty-fourth thriller starring medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta. The stakes are always high for Kay, and this time out they are raised by a poetic cyberbully who knows way too many intimate details about her, her family, and her forensics team. Fans of the series will not be surprised by the identity of the villain, but if they can last through the interminable opening dialogue and the tedious walk through Harvard Square, they will rejoice when the forensics tent is finally set up and Kay shifts into overdrive. A young woman has been killed while riding her bicycle in JFK Park, her body displaying all the classic marks of a lightning strike. The weather is unbearably hot and humid, but there are no clouds and no thunder. Cornwell serves up a chaos theory all her own that includes an application of nanotechnology that is as terrifying as the disturbed minds of its creators. The ending borders on melodramatic but brings unexpected revelations that will undoubtedly affect her familial relationships in future stories. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Despite some unevenness in her recent efforts, Cornwell continues to sit comfortably at the crime-fiction best-seller table.--Murphy, Jane Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In bestseller Cornwell's uneven 24th Kay Scarpetta novel (after 2015's Depraved Heart), the forensic pathologist investigates the bizarre death of 23-year-old Brit Elisa Vandersteelis, who was riding her bicycle in a Cambridge, Mass., park when she suffered a fatal electrical burn that looks like a lightning strike but isn't. Meanwhile, Scarpetta's FBI agent husband, Benton Wesley, is called away on matters of national security, which turn out to involve the sudden death of Gen. John Briggs, a long-time friend of Scarpetta's and one of the backers of her Cambridge Forensic Center. Electricity seemed to play a role in his death, too, making Scarpetta believe there's a connection. Of course, whenever there's a series of suspicious deaths, the specter of Carrie Grethen, Scarpetta's nemesis, isn't far from her thoughts. Coupled with threats she's been receiving from the mysterious Tailend Charlie, these new deaths appear to fit Carrie's MO. Lots of cutting-edge forensic detail and some revelatory character moments help compensate for a plot with only occasional flashes of narrative energy. Agent: Esther Newberg, ICM. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Dr. Kay Scarpettas talk to the bigwigs at Harvards Kennedy School of Government is delayed by murder, malicious online posts, anonymous messages, a visit from her sister, and a familiar malefactor from her past in this kitchen-sink 24th installment.Walking through Harvard Yard in the brutal September heat, Scarpetta muses that normal days for a forensic pathologist are shockingly abnormal for everyone else. As if to prove her point, she instantly gets word from her old frenemy Cambridge Police Investigator Pete Marino that a call to 911 complained that shed just quarreled violently with Bryce Clark, her chief of staff. Scarpetta, already pondering a series of obscure but meticulously timed messages shes had from someone calling himself Tailend Charlie, is in no mood for the impending visit from her disapproving younger sister, Dorothy, whose flight to Boston keeps getting delayed. So its a perfect time for Anya and Enya Rummage, a pair of dull-witted teenage twins, to report finding a body in John F. Kennedy Park. Arriving at the crime scene, Scarpetta realizes with a shock that she encountered Elisa Vandersteel in passing only a few hours before her death. Is her old nemesis, that monstrous psychopath Carrie Grethen, trying to get at her yet again (Depraved Heart, 2015, etc.) by killing a stranger who crossed her path? And just how was the Canadian-born Elisa, whod been working as an au pair in tech CEO William Portisons Mayfair home, killed? Even the twins noticed a burning smell coming from the body, but theres no meteorological sign of the lightning strike that would seem to be the most obvious cause for her death. Fans, aware that this particular fatality is incidental to the larger saga of the heroines epic struggle with the forces of evil, will forgive the absence of a coherent mystery or characters worth caring about. The closest analogue to Cornwells wildly successful series, in fact, may be a superhero franchise. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
