Early Patricia Cornwall and her feisty heroine, Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta, an intruiging and satisfying read for current CSI fans.I for one was a fan befor I ever saw a CSI episode.This time an elusive killer manages to murder and conceal the bodies of courting couples untill they are decomposed beyond recognition, leaving behind a virtually spotless crime scene.Kay comes under fire for her failure to establish the cause of death in any one of these tragic murders. The next couple to go missing turn out to be the daughter of the possible future Vice President of the US and her boyfriend, good clean cut all American kids. When a sniffer dog reacts with terror at the scene of the abandoned vehicle in the mothers presence, the reader is shocked into the horror and despair that the family of a missing child must endure.Much to my dismay we are
left in the dark as to why the dog reacts in this way
right untill the end. Then we have the team,macho,pot bellied, bald and recently jilted, Detective Merino, Kays sidekick, is the perfect foil to her genteel refinement. They make the perfectly imperfect, mismatched match. Their peculiar friendship adds a dimension of warm humanity to ameliorate their gruesome and soul destroying work. Against this is the somewhat tense relationship with Wesley Benton the FBI profiler, who plays a lesser role in this
book than he does in other later ones.The book has the usual fascinating autopsy and forensic details as well as the intrigue and cloak and dagger stuff of a FBI/CIA conspiracy suspicion.I also enjoyed the issues around friendships,career concerns, and divided loyalties,raised by the sudden reappearance of an
old journalist girlfriend, of Kays. We are left guessing as to her motives and involvment right to the end and vascillate between Merino's judgement of her as a turncoat and Kays persistent faith in her old friend. Although not her first novel, if you,ve never yet read Patricvia Cornwall, this is a great one to start with unless you can get your hands on all these books in there right order.
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