Am I the only one that found the plot way too convoluted? Taking an older murder from another state, sending the blood evidence to a lab in California and having this huge conspiracy about insider trading with a rape thrown in for no good reason that I could see. And I'm so jaded I thought the rape was actually a BDSM sexual encounter that was taken the wrong way.

I'm pretty sure this is my first time reading this author and I don't plan on picking up any of her other books anytime soon.

One of my worst reads EVER! The story line is stupid. The background mystery is stupid. The foreground plot is stupid. Horribly written. It was a total waste of time.

Here is my review of the #2 book, it is the same.

I read the first Garano book "At Risk" and was thoroughly disappointed, but I bought both the books online together, and I did like the character Winston Garano and thought surely she would flesh him out a little more in the second book. Unless you like reading extremely skeletal outlines of what a story will be when it is written, don't bother getting this book.

I am a huge Cornwell/Scarpetta fan. The last several books of the series really weren't very good. And the last one I read was really pretty bad and rather disjointed. This new series is worse. Much worse. As in horrible. It is poorly written, the characters besides Garano and his grandmother are not even likable/interesting. It is seriously like an outline written by a high school student with a good idea but no writing skills at all. If it had not been in a large font and had been edited at all it would have been about 100 pages long.

I cannot repeat enough how truly bad these two books were.

I kind of liked this -- I liked Win and loved Grandma and Miss Dog. Also loved the threat Win made to the sleaze who was bothering his ex-girlfriend and was mean to the dog. This book was short and succinct -- are those the same thing?? Did not like that Sykes put her job on the line to help Win. This was a lot better than The Front, which I read first. It was kind of a relief from Kay Scarpetta and Lucy and Benton and all that drama. But -- I'll still read Autopsy when it comes out.

If I didn't know Cornwell wrote this book, I would have never guessed that she was the author. It didn't seem like her kind of writing at all, I've read the two books in this series and I still hate every single character. Well, except Garanos nana, but that's it.

Picked this one up off the "library" shelf at the office, to take on holiday with me. Will abandon it where I finish it, in all likelihood.

*-*-*

Okay, I've read it now. And meh. We got off to a bad start together with the narrative written in present tense irritating me. I got over that, and was initially intrigued by the protagonist and his situation, and the premise of using new technology to solve an old case. But then the storyline diverged, and the protagonist was in one city working a new, local crime of immediate concern, and he had someone else working on the cold case in another city, and the story got really disjointed and I had difficulty following its convolutions for a time. By the time I got to the denouement, any interest or concern I felt for the characters had long disappeared; I finished the book out of curiosity to see how it ended, not because I felt any stake in the outcome.

This is my first of Cornwell's non-Kay Scarpetta novels, and I can't say it was particularly enjoyable or memorable. Which is too bad, because I really enjoyed the early Scarpetta novels.

As my first Patricia Cornwell book, I had high hopes. Sadly, with this book anyway, I was fairly disappointed. Nothing about it engaged or interested me; it felt very...empty, severely lacking in actual story. However I won't let it put me off as I've heard such great things about the Kay Scarpetta series

I loved the Scarpetta series, so have continued to try more Cornwell novels. Following my vast disappointment when starting the Brazil series, I thought I'd switch and try the Garano series instead. It was OK. Some characters still grated but I did find some of the plotline drew me in to want to keep reading. I might try the next book as well and see if this series develops further.

I that this book was a major disappointment. Patricia Cornwell has certainly written much better books in the past. Everything felt very unfinished. It felt like this might have been a few chapters of another book and was discarded....and now published later. Don't bother.

if you love pat you will love this

My first-ever Patricia Cornwall and likely my last.* This book was rough, y'all. As in, it's hard to believe anyone edited this book at all and also I guess who cares when you're as successful a writer as Cornwall is? 

It's a perpetually sad reality (in life and in publishing): The more "famous" someone gets, the less likely they have people around them telling them any semblance of the truth. 

I imagine at multiple stages in her career and with how prolific she's been for so many years that Cornwall uses a bevy of ghostwriters [and likely probably did back in 2006 when this was first published?], but honestly, it doesn't matter. The writing is terrible, whoever wrote it, and the dialogue is some of the lamest and most confusingly written I've ever encountered, even for a book vying for mass-market paperback status. 

You'd think a woman-hating man wrote this drivel, but: nope. Ugh. Anyway. Life is too short to spend more time writing this review, and thankfully there are so many better books out there to read. 

*Unless I decide to read one of her TWENTY-FOUR Kay Scarpetta novels (plenty of reviewers said those early books were much stronger and much better written); we'll see. 

[1 star for being a book I could finish in an afternoon.]

It's been a few years since I last read one of Cornwell's books. I don't know why, because I really like her writing, and I enjoyed the series I was several books into.
Anyway, I did enjoy the story. My only complaint was how I perceived the bad guys: they were just so bad, when one who appeared to be such a nice guy until he was found out, and turned out to be the baddest of all the bad guys. Another was a sixty year old couple who were universally considered "a nice quiet people who nobody gave anyone a moment of trouble."
The final bad guy was actually a sort of a good guy who had been deceived ,but more than a little deranged. Most of the characters seemed somewhat one dimensional. And was a problem for me. But not enough to take away my enjoyment of reading this book. Plus it's the first of a two book series. I'm looking forward to reading the second one.

Whilst I enjoyed this book it was not the best that I have read from this author. The story revolves around an old case that is being reopened to highlight and showcase new technology in forensic science and to help the election hopes of a woman district attorney. The old case turns out to be the backstory. The DA is raped and an attempt is made to murder her and the detective she brought in to review and solve the old case then effectively takes on the two cases. The reason for the attempted murder is sniffed out at the end of the novel and the old case is cleared up too. The character of Winston Garano ( Win ) is developed reasonably well but still only a 4 star from me.