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Scarpetta Factor (2001)

by Patricia Cornwell(Favorite Author)

3.62 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

0316733164 (ISBN13: 9780316733168)

languge

English

genre

Mystery & Thriller

publisher

Little, Brown

series

Kay Scarpetta

review 1: Ms. Cornwell, you have gotten oh so wordy and oh so boring. Kay is no longer Kay. Where have you hidden her and why? Dump Benton. He is boringly pedantic and tiring. I'm over all the anger your characters always seem to ooze. Marino is the only one you seem to have improved. He's still Marino but a better one. Lucy's attitude sucks. Kay seems to just flounder.Maybe you just don't enjoy writing any more.
review 2: I know, I know: Several years ago I vowed not to read any more Scarpetta mysteries. I had gotten to the point, with the volume called simply Scarpetta, that I couldn't stand Cornwell’s characters any more.Well, times change, and it’s hard to keep resolutions, and I wearied of weak plotting and characterization in other so-called mysteries ... more(most recently Richard Castle’s Heat Wave) and returned to Cornwell.Where in The Scarpetta Factor I rejoiced for what is excellent about her work: strong and determined and intelligent female characters, both straight and gay; the difficult but rewarding relationship between Kay Scarpetta and her brilliant niece, Lucy Farinelli; the more-routine relationship between Scarpetta and her husband, Benton; the bumbling but street-wise Pete Marino; the complex and not always positive relationships between all those people.And I agonized over what is terrible about her work: the repetitive, redundant, and boring agonizing, by every character in their turn, over every goddamn problem in their lives, including the current case. The writing: basically good but needing tightening and trimming, but since Cornwell can get anything she writes published, the rigor just is not there. The plotting: intricate, far-fetched, unlikely, with side stories (think of them as subroutines) that add thousands of words (I’m thinking of Warner Agee) but no more meaning. The psychology: yes, we love psychology, but does every villain have to be a massively intelligent psychopath? Whatever happened to hapless bunglers with weapons? What about dumb luck? It plays such a part in most of our lives, but in Cornwell’s world it just doesn't seem to happen. And the worst thing of all, at least in this book: Since when can the prime suspect appear at the 80% mark in a kindle book? Isn’t that cheating, fooling the reader, bringing in a negative deus ex machina? And why does that villain have to suffer from an extremely rare but sinister disease (he’s essentially a werewolf) which required him to have numerous plastic surgeries, so no one knows what he looks like since his pelt has been lasered off, but he feels compelled to sprinkle wolf fur around his crime scenes? Is this a halloween party for ten-year-olds?There are good side trips here, notably the one with Carley Crispin, the TV personality; it added thousands of words while advancing the plot approximately two skips along the road to Sorry, but she’s a type we’ve all observed and of course we were happy to meet her again. The evil shrink (why should a psychotherapist also be a psychopath) appears.The computer and medical facts make us feel intelligent even though we probably aren’t, but after a while we wonder if we’re reading a Clancy hardware story.So, to wrap it all up, the Cornwell books have something for everyone, but after we close the covers we start wondering how likely any of this is. Oh, well. less

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