Chief Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta has two current problems: the latest case of a headless/limbless torso found at a landfill site in Virginia, & her relationship with Benton Wesley. The torso is similar to five cases in Ireland, plus four in the US but are they related cases? Scarpetta is sent disturbing emails from an anonymous source calling themselves 'deadoc' with photographs of the Virginia torso at the kill site. During the investigation Scarpetta is exposed to smallpox, a disease eradicated in the wild but still kept at some secure locations, & the CDC & a military germ warfare task force get involved. Scarpetta is put in quarantine & tries to lure deadoc into conversation online so the FBI can track them down. By the time Scarpetta is out of quarantine, it seems the killer has tried to create a smallpox epidemic on Tangier Island, but one death hits closer to home.

This was an ok but not great read. Scarpetta was at her most annoying at times, especially after starting to feel sick with an unknown illness. Did she put herself back into quarantine? Did she heck! She was taking taxis, flying on planes, & generally being a possible one-woman germ disseminator. Fair enough she is a medical doctor & said she knew she wasn't contagious, but this was not the run-of-the-mill smallpox.

She was also pretty awful to Benton at times. His wife left him for another man following Benton's affair with Scarpetta, & Benton now wants to marry Scarpetta - whose reaction is to make herself suddenly unavailable. Even Marino was feeling sorry for the guy! There were one or two things that weren't cleared up by the end - were the Ireland cases related to the other torsos? Was Keith Pleasants bailed at the earliest opportunity? 3.5 (rounded up)

We take a short trip to Ireland in the beginning and it's a nice fresh perspective from Cornwell to have something completely different in her series. As luck would have it, and my guess was right, we return to the initial Irishness at the end as the first character IS the killer.
It's a shame that the element of harassing Kay is back with the killer emailing her phoyos of the murdered victims, it's kind of exhausting having Kay be the focus of these killers book after book.
But it's always interesting to read about future technology in these books, especially in this one, written in 97, Lucy explains about LCD and virtual reality and so forth.
Lucy's still hanging strong in there and will have to go to court to get her former object of affection into prison.
We have too much military equipment and vessel description such as different planes and helicopters which have no interest to me, but at least the killer in the end was just your regular Irish bitch.

of course it was a good read. would i say it’s a great read? no. but that’s life and it kept me interested and the plot got twisty which i enjoyed. i wish there was more buildup to the final ending but nevertheless, it was enjoyable.

Cornwell's styles is always engaging and does not disappoint with "Unnatural Exposure". That being said she does get a little technical when it comes to the forensic side of the descriptions. This is part of what makes her writing so great as it paints such detailed pictures. I am working my way through the whole Scarpetta series and have not read one yet i would not highly recommend.

Review pending and rating withheld until I am less annoyed.

I was not impressed with the last one. This one was worse. There was one story line I enjoyed, but of course it ended immediately. I have the next 3 borrowed from a friend so I'm at least going to finish those but idk about continuing this series after that. The later books I've read have improved in some ways and declined in others. The writing is pretty decent on the whole but the characters are extremely unlikable.

_____Update: 2.5**, not rounding up.______


Beware, there are book and series spoilers if you keep reading.

This book starts with Dr. Scarpetta in Ireland. She’s been on the trail of a killer dismembering bodies. Ok, very cool. I want to catch this guy. That's what this book is about, right? Right?

Back in Virginia, a dismembered body shows up in a trash dump. A sloppy, self-aggrandizing investigator with VIP family connections thinks the cases are linked, but Scarpetta doesn’t. This investigator is a jerk who hates Scarpetta and Lucy. He's an all around human turd. His feud with them continues for the entire book as he arrests the wrong person and targets Lucy. Meanwhile someone, possibly the killer, is emailing Scarpetta photos of the body before it was dumped.

My favorite part of this book was the food. That’s probably the only truly good part of the book. The crabcake recipe made me hungry.

In most Scarpetta books, I run into something interesting on a technical level where I end up looking up articles on the science behind the cases, which is a major draw I can see this series having despite my issues with it. Unfortunately, this book was the exception. The plot ran more on Scarpetta's outrage and personal persecution complex than the actual details of the case. Moving on...

Scarpetta is nasty to coworkers which is nothing new. In this book, she makes a big deal about not wanting anyone to touch or rearrange anything (Marino and the files on her desk, Wesley and literally touching dishes). Like look, I get not wanting anyone in your stuff. I dare you to touch my embroidery or my knitting. Scarpetta takes this to a whole new level though. It’s like she resents people breathing around her.

If you’re planning a Scarpetta drinking game, do not drink when Scarpetta tries to intimidate someone either with her medical license or her law degree because you might die. This is something that has annoyed me in other books, but in this one it is overwhelming. This book is full of her ego. Highlights include threatening to sue reporters over a parking space and making judgmental assumptions about female nurses.

I think I rolled my eyes hard enough to get whiplash when Scarpetta leaves quarantine after a smallpox exposure to perform an autopsy because it’s her case. Like, girl, tell me you’re insecure without peeing on your territory.

I have skipped around in the series. I have read later books that include Carrie but this is the earliest mention of her I’ve run into. I gather her affair with Lucy and the crimes that sent her to prison occur in one of the books I’ve missed. Anyway, this book sees the characters anticipating the trial.

Scarpetta makes a big deal about not exposing anyone to an infectious disease, but we know she’s full of BS because she doesn’t know she hasn’t been exposed to smallpox. She insists it’s the flu without evidence and interacts with coworkers even when another doctor tells her what the incubation period for smallpox is. Scarpetta just decides she’s right and gets mad anyone who questions her.

Speaking of not having evidence… one of the subplots involves the jerk of an investigator arresting/harassing a worker from the dump. Scarpetta believes he’s innocent, but the investigator thinks he dismembered and dumped the body himself rather than just being there when it was found. The guy strings together a flimsy circumstantial case, and while he does have a few coincidences, most of his case seems to be based on the fact that the suspect is gay and the investigator is a homophobe. When it gets back to Scarpetta that the investigator is making comments and looking into her and Lucy, Scarpetta ends up talking to a Sheriff to get the situation sorted out. Scarpetta goes to the Sheriff and makes a bunch of outlandish claims which she doesn’t back up at all and the sheriff just takes her word for it and decides to help the guy who might be a serial killer. Ok. Then Scarpetta crosses what might be a professional line where she arranges to help the suspect get legal representation and bail.

Wingo was a missed opportunity. We see him emotional and maybe overreacting to a corpse with signs of chickenpox in the early pages of the book. Then we learn he has just been diagnosed with HIV. He is struggling. Wingo mentions being afraid of ending up in hospice alone when discussing his diagnosis with Scarpetta. Wingo contracts smallpox during the case when uses a contaminated product sent to his house by the killer. I wish his story had been expanded on more. It only takes up a few pages. He passes away in the end. I recently read Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers about the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. While I am glad that Wingo didn’t die the lingering death he talks about fearing, I do wish we had gotten to see more of his world. (Feel free to drop book recommendations in the comments).

I did find it weird that she’s getting Wingo’s permission to contact his doctor and consult with on his case. Ok, she’s a doctor, but not that kind of doctor. How much help is a pathologist going to be to an infectious disease specialist? It comes off as Scarpetta being arrogant and overvaluing her opinion as well as having control issues. In other books, Scarpetta has a strange way of checking in too closely on Lucy (talking to her bosses, at one point thinking about if she should talk to Lucy’s psychiatrist and wondering if Lucy is struggling with undiagnosed bipolar disorder). This overbearing nosiness does not sit well with me. I can’t decide if I think this is lazy writing and this is just how the author chooses to dispense information when writing in 1st person pov or if this is supposed to be Scarpetta being supportive and compassionate.

How it ends:
The killer is a coworker who feels like her career was destroyed years ago by an accident someone else caused. This has resulted with her being passed over repeatedly and caused her to become bitter. Remember that nugget of gold, because we’re coming back to it. Anyways, the killer stole smallpox samples from a lab she worked at in England. She bioengineered the virus at home… somehow without contaminating anything dying of it herself. Ok. That stretches plausibility but I’ll buy it. Maybe super brilliant archenemy PhD lady can cook viruses safely in her kitchen.

What I don’t buy is how the case is solved. Scarpetta finds out that her coworker also has the flu and so Scarpetta decides to take this woman a meal of her home-cooked stew and talk about the case with her at her home. Yea, Scarpetta who is rude and inappropriate with every single person she works with decides to bring a meal to someone who is sick because she’s such a nice caring person. This is completely out of character for her. I could believe that Scarpetta found out that her coworker took home some important paperwork and driving over to retrieve it and berate her but helping someone just to be nice… Nah.

Anyway, Scarpetta walks into the woman’s house and sees that this is where the e-mailed pictures of the crime scene were taken and BOOM--case solved. I don't have a problem with the fact that the case is solved by accident. Sometimes luck happens. Back to how the killer claims that years of being passed over made her bitter--she stole the smallpox samples immediately before the stigma of the accident settled on her, and by the time she's in working with Scarpetta no one even really remembers she involved in the first place. She comes off as a cackling, megalomaniac whose actions are extreme compared to the slight she suffered. I don't see someone who would react with that level of overkill (crossing international borders to create a new smallpox virus and target her oh-so-perfect boss the great Scarpetta) being able to blend in with normal people for the years it took to carry this out.

Patricia Cornwell portrays the relatable quirks of professional and personal life. The focus of Kay Scarpetta’s morgue staff is mercifully not on that job but on what a day is like for them as people. In this series, it is fun to know the early internet well. I had PCs before most people and smile at the FBI’s technical prowess in 1997. Computers had 8 mgs of RAM: the size of one JPG photo or MP3 song, in 2019 today! They connected to the internet like I do in rural Manitoba: via telephone modem. These novels are fantastic time capsules, spanning 1990 to 2016. I love the observable increase in modernity.

Each case is different, this one opening in Dublin and shifting to a Virginia island. However, prolific novels vary in quality. I gave this one two stars for expending detail on threads that were dropped and for a motive that was too trite for an act of horror. Lack of career advancement is not a plausible cause!

“Unnatural Exposure” has two mysteries: identifying dismembered torsos and why they contain smallpox; an old threat to humanity that vaccinations made extinct. That was interesting and urgent. The perpetrator taunted Kay by e-mail and the FBI pinpointed an empty location. Considering collaboration with the FBI, disease control quarantining the island, and unidentified victims: readers have the impression of a tough case to crack.

All that emphasis fell flat, for Kay to abruptly end up at the killer’s house and see who it was. It was as if the combined forces dominating this novel were irrelevant. We do not learn if Ireland’s victims had the same murderer. Animal testing was unapologetically discussed, despite attesting that results are inapplicable to humans. However, I own Patricia’s other books, which I am sure to like better.

This book is quite apt for the current affairs of the last few weeks.
Dr Kay Scarpetta is part of a series of books and it doesn’t really matter if you don’t read them in order.
This time we follow Scarpetta as she tries to solve the origin of a mystery type of pox which threatens to become a mass epidemic.
I enjoy Patricia Cornwells books but this one seemed to lack a bit of pace.

Good book

I am rereading this series in the year 2022 and finding eerie similarities to current events happening now. A monkey virus us spreading as I read. Another good book!

Unnatural Exposure is not only a thriller, but like Patricia Cornwell's other Kay Scarpetta novels, it is written from the perspective of a forensic pathologist, which was very original when the author published her first crime stories with Dr Kay Scarpetta as the main protagonist. There is a lot of work behind the scenes of her writing, as every detail has been carefully thought out, documented and dissected with the utmost precision.

Each Dr Kay Scarpetta novel is a new investigation with her team at the Richmond, Virginia, Institute of Pathology, but also a minutious field research involving Detective Pete Marino, FBI Special Agent Benton Wesley and her extremely talented niece Lucy, now an FBI Special Agent herself, all of whom have been a part of Kay's personal and professional life and protagonists of the novels for all the years before.

Interestingly, Kay Scarpetta's personal life is closely intertwined with her work as an expert and her investigations. Her own challenges, the difficulties she faces are part of the story. Written on the first person, all of this give the plot a special dimension. We readers are close spectators of Dr Kay's vulnerabilities, her family back in Florida, her Italian roots, her niece, her tasty pasta dishes, her frustrations, her courage, her strength, her professionalism, and her fears. Did Patricia Cornwell identify with Kay Scarpetta?

I have read most of Patricia Cornwell's books over the years and I thought that it was time for a summer-reread of some. I admit that I was less enthusiastic about From Potter's Field although the investigation was well conducted towards a realistic development, but I found Unnatural Exposure particularly thrilling and, perhaps, chillingly visionary.

Dr Kay Scarpetta once again saves the day. As I was reading this title in the series, I realized that although I can be annoyed by the formulaic plots, the insistence that in every book, the plot must revolve around the pathologist personally, and even the fact that Scarpetta seems to work in a perpetual late fall/ winter where extreme weather is constant, I am totally engaged by these tales.

It's Cornwell's writing that grabs me and holds me even more than the fast moving plot lines. It's not the characters as much as it is the words used to describe them. Cornwell's protagonist is nearly always troubled, worried, put upon, and impossibly busy. In the series so far, she's flown in practically every flavor of aircraft short of the Space Shuttle, met and worked with a huge variety of higher ups in a bewildering array of government agencies (having been friends with and/or colleagues with most of them), and has been the most hands on Chief Medical Examiner of an entire state that ever existed. She's scuba dived into a freezing cold, muddy river, to retrieve a body.

In this story she discovers a deadly pox that has been unleashed by a terrorist - spoiler alert the terrorist is a lone wolf colleague and friend of hers who has been saving the virus for decades, waiting for just this moment to exact her revenge. Scarpetta, typically, blames herself for not having figured it all out sooner, but we know that the damage done would have been much, much greater without her on the case. She finally realizes who it is when she as at the woman's home, helping her recover from the flu with a container of her homemade stew, which she conveniently cooks in bulk and keeps in her freezer. She's a world class cook too, of course.

This is all related in great and distinct detail (Cornwell took Hemingway's advice to heart). There is poetry in these words, images striking and vivid and new. She stays true to the long plot, of her and Mark and Lucy and Benton and perhaps most of all, Marino, who's been on the edge of stroking out for as long as we have known him. He of course is also in love with Scarpetta - she also has that certain something that nearly every man within pole vaulting distance wants to be near, and with. She's powerful, cranky, neurotic to a fault, incredibly well educated, with an unerring instinct for the truth. It's all in retrospect not believable. But as I race through each book I find I cannot wait to get to the next page and the one after that. I am fully committed, and all I can say now is that I hope the rest of the series maintains this standard of good.

bis auf einen kleinen Hänger ist das Buch echt spannend :)

This book in the Scarpetta series is a vast improvement to the series.
I was turned off the series for a little while because Kaye Scarpetta became such a Debbie-downer to read that her storyline was exhausting.

Her character has definitely turned around in this book. There are some great settings here with Tangier Island and a fantastic plot twist that you won’t see coming!