Product Description

Florida is full of human predators, and they all give Dr Kay Scarpetta the opportunity and the means to do what she does best - persuading the dead to speak to her. And in Boston, Benton Wesley is working on a secret case involving convicted killers. It is a project which gives Scarpetta deep disquiet, as does the behaviour of her niece, Lucy, who is spending too much time in cheap bars looking for casual pick-ups. The Academy is called when a woman's body is found in Boston. She has been tortured, sexually abused, her body tattooed with handprints. The same sort of handprints Lucy had seen on the flesh of her latest pick-up. Meanwhile, Scarpetta and Marino are investigating the disappearance of a family in Florida, called in by a concerned neighbour, but as they search and find the tell-tale signs of abduction rather than disappearance, they also discover that someone had assumed the identity of the caller, and she is now dead. They've been set up, and it becomes clear that someone is tracking their every move.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #35488 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 466 pages

Review
'Totally compelling with lots of twists and turns.' WOMAN 'As ever the atmosphere is brooding, the tension highly spun and engaging, the psychology subtle and the wealth of anatomical detail enough to make any bloke hide behind the sofa.' THE TIMES 'This book is sensationally plotted, with a twist at the end that will leave you gasping for breath.' DAILY EXPRESS 'Dr Kay Scarpetta returns with another first-class forensic thriller that will definitely keep you guessing.' CRIME CONFIDENTIAL

About the Author
Patricia Cornwell's first novel, POSTMORTEM, was published in 1990 and won five international awards. Her Scarpetta novels have since become Number One bestsellers throughout the world. She has also published three police procedurals, HORNET'S NEST, SOUTHERN CROSS and ISLE OF DOGS.

Customer Reviews

not the best ....but not the worst
Thankfully better than her last two offerings but still no hint of returning to her former glory. As always the forensic and scientific detail are finely tuned and informative and there is a steady, if not slightly boring at times, pace

My biggest problems with Predator, and indeed Trace and Blowfly, were that i was completely indifferent as to what was happening, I just didn't care. The second is that, it's not the fact that Cornwell has switched from writing in the first to third person, but that we are now forced to spend time with charcters that are truly insufferable and who, as characters, haven't developed in any way, shape or form since the beginning, inparticular Lucy and Marino.
I'm a huge Cornwell fan and can only hope that things will get better.

What has happened to Cornwell?
I have been a devotee of Patricia Cornwell since she first started writing the Scarpetta series. Her last two books, "Blow Fly" and "Trace" have, in my opinion, gone off the boil. With "Predator" it doesn't even reach a simmer! To start with, she continues writing in the present tense. I find this supremely irritating and I wish she would stop doing it. The plot is scrappy and over complicated. I'm one of these tiresome people who have to finish a book once I've started it. I have never been more glad than when, last night, I closed the final page of this lacklustre book. By then I couldn't have given a toss about who did what to whom, or why. If there was a "No star" category, that's where this would have gone.

Serves me right!
I keep buying these books in the hope that there will be a return to form but I am always disappointed. This one is the worst by far. We are now asked to stretch out imaginations to the point that Lucy is richer than Bill Gates and has a highly sophisticated computer network that the US Government, never mind the myriad super-hackers out there, have no idea exists. She then leaves the whole thing wide open without anyone noticing the breach for months. In reality the Marino phone tapping would have been noticed by any cheap call logging system, let alone Demi-God Lucy. Do some research Patricia!

Secondly, I found the resurrection of Benton Wesley tiresome when it happened, as it was so clearly a case of major backtracking once Cornwell realised that she actually needed him to pad out the stories quite a bit. Now we are supposed to believe that she and the so-called love of her life live mostly apart, communicate by email and nearly seperate when the child-from-hell Lucy comes between them, despite her 'burying' him once.

Thirdly, I just don't buy into the Marino falling-out. They have been close for years, with some unrequited feelings on Marino's side, and yet we are asked to believe that they fall out over a simple mistake on Marino's part. His transformation to pretendy hells angel doesn't work either.

The last few pages are rushed and laughable, and leave the reader feeling cheated out of a fiver. Avoid!