It's difficult for me to even grasp what a mess this book was. Some things were so incredibly obvious to the reader (or at least, to this reader) that they could be discerned 200 pages before the characters realized them, and yet other things that readers were curious about for the entire book were never even revealed at all. Plot threads were dropped at random and not picked up again for 100 or 200 pages, and other threads were just dropped altogether for no apparent reason. Personally, I started suspecting the person who turned out to be the murderer, was indeed the murderer, at least 250 pages before it was revealed. And there were some suspicions that should have been raised for the characters - indeed, if they had happened to me, I would have looked into what might have caused this or that to happen, and I don't even work at a top-secret institute - and yet the characters just blindly bungled along ignoring the glaringly obvious, which made me feel so impatient with them throughout this book. And to make it all worse, Cornwell committed one of the worst writing sins - she was constantly referring to how the characters felt (and in clunky language, no less) instead of actually SHOWING us readers what they felt, and some behavior that was, to me, completely uncharacteristic for some of the longtime characters was never explained at all, much less in a way I found satisfactory.

Additionally, having not read any Scarpetta books for several years after having read them voraciously in the late '90s and early '00s, I was completely perplexed by the fact that one of the main characters, who was killed in an earlier book (in, what I may add, was a very moving plot that brought me and many other fans at the time to tears), was alive in this one and everyone was acting like they'd never been killed. It was only when I went back to the library and thumbed quickly through the books I hadn't read from around 2003 to now that I realized that one of the books I'd missed had revealed that they had in fact not actually died after all. If I wanted plot points like that, I'd be watching soap operas instead of reading mysteries.

I'd read a review that I thought had been published a few years ago saying that Cornwell seemed back on her game after several missteps, and I'd hoped this was the book they'd referenced, as I couldn't remember for sure. After reading this and finding it rather ridiculous, I went back to the library and got the book I almost got instead of this one, Trace. I'd initially thought Trace was the one the reviewer had discussed, but then doubted myself. I'm only a few pages into Trace, and so far it's better than this one ever was.

I give up. No matter how hard I try I simply do not like the authors writing style!

Different style than the earlier books but still good.