Product Description

'For all the gory details, Cornwell's novels are deeply comforting' Independent

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #19004 in Books
• Published on: 2005-04-25
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 496 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Break out the champagne: Patricia Cornwell has thankfully moved on from her controversial campaign to lay the Jack the Ripper murders at the door of the painter Walter Sickert, and in Trace is again raising our pulse rate by taking us into the dangerous world of consultant pathologist Dr Kay Scarpetta.

In this latest outing, Kay finds herself back in Virginia examining a curious death, that of the youthful Gilly Paulson. Joel Marcus, her successor as Chief Medical Examiner, has summoned a reluctant Scarpetta to help out, but her professional work is compromised by her unhappiness at the radical changes occurring in her old territory: Scarpetta's old morgue has been bulldozed, and she isn’t happy working with the man who took her job. Other members of the familiar Scarpetta crew make an appearance: her partner Benton Wesley and her niece Lucy Farinelli are tracking down an assailant who has nearly ended the life of one of Lucy’s colleagues. The two cases turn out to be connected (surprise!), and soon several lives are at stake.

After the recent misfires, it’s a relief to note that Patricia Cornwell is back on track, dealing comfortably with her most familiar protagonist and a plot that yokes in bomb-makers and some bizarre sexual practices. A resounding welcome back, to both Ms Cornwell and Ms Scarpetta.--Barry Forshaw

Review
'When she is this good, she is hard to beat.' New Statesman 'Forget the pretenders. Cornwell reigns.' Mirror --This book has been read but is in good condition.

About the Author
Since the first novel was published in 1990, Patricia Cornwell and her creation, Kay Scarpetta, have become household names and she has earned widespread critical acclaim. She helped to establish the Virginia Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine and serves as Chairman of the Board.

Customer Reviews

Confused and confusing Cornwell
Quite simply unbelievably poor. There is no real plot and what there is totally lacks credibility; subplots and characters appear and disappear at will, the book trails off as though Ms Cornwell simply lost interest towards the end. I was extremely disappointed and she'll have to do a lot to redeem herself. Perhaps this is what happens when an author gets so full of herself that editors daren't change so much as a comma. Avoid.

Not a Page Turner
Quite simply the worse Patricia Cornwell I've ever read. Very Dull. I prefer the earlier novels - more about the case and less about Lucy and her strange life. I kept reading this book in case the story improved, but it was only in the last 75 pages or so that the story started and finished very rapidly.

Patricia has lost the plot
When I first began reading novels by Cornwell, they were in the un-put-downable category. Somewhere along the way she has lost the ability to tell a good yarn and tell it well.

This book is an improvement on her last book, "Blowfly", but that is about the only good thing you can say about it.

She introduces too many carachters, has too many plot threads spread over too many locations. Scarpetta is dithering, Marino isn't much better. Benton might as well have stayed dead!!!

The plot limps along around the story of yet another of Lucy's lovers and the unexplained death of a teenager in Richmond. Scarpetta returns at the request of the new Coroner, who is so memorable that I have already forgotten his name. The old OCME building is being demolished, during the process of which a digger driver manages to crush himself and trace evidence found on the dead girl also turns up during the investigation into his death.

We are introduced to a person called Edgar Allen Pogue, who talks to his dead mother, but unlike in the case of Norman Bates, we never find out if Pogue has Mom locked in the cellar. He does however like to keep the ashes of people he has cremated in the morgue. A pity he didn't cremate himself and we would have been spared this dull and boring book.

I no longer read a new Cornwell book in 2 days, I struggled with this one for over two weeks and was relieved when is crawled to a pathetic halt. Do yourself a favour, borrow it from a friend or the library, it's not worth spending any money on.

Time for Scarpetta and maybe even Cornwell to retire and stay there. On a scale of 1 to 10 this book is about a minus 2.