Boy! This booked pissed me off!

Normally I would give this book a better review, but no. This book has all the angst and mystery that you expect from a Patricia Cornwell novel. The plot is a continuation of a storyline started in a previous novel, the pursuit of Temple Gault. Gault is just as dark and manipulative as in the other books and you race to the climax of the book to see if he will get away to torment Kay Scarpetta in the next novel, or will this chapter finally reach its conclusion?

After 350 pages of taut writing and involving narrative, the whole book resolves in n  two paragraphsn! And they aren't even long paragraphs. After the investment in time that I spent with the characters I had hoped for something more, a lot more.

Maybe there will be more resolution in the next book, but this one just left me feeling cheated.

I'm a huge fan of Kate Scarpetta and Patricia Cornwell she doe an excellent job of keeping her character sympathetic and interesting. Which when you write many books about the same person can be a challenge.She also has a way making the villain hateful yet you want to know about him or her.Her heroine appears brilliant but also suffers from the same thing s the rest of us do.All and all another fine read

n  SPOILERSn

30/3 - Like The Body Farm this book's title is false advertising. An even smaller portion of the book was dedicated to what's named in the title - the first victim is originally a Jane Doe and is buried in Potter's Field (her real identity is later discovered and she's moved to a family plot). Thinking about the plot of the book I can't think of an appropriate title off the top of my head, so maybe Cornwell had a similar mental block and at the last minute just pulled the title from an interesting (though barely mentioned) location that she had used in the book, not even considering how little it had to do with the story. Or maybe the publisher thought the idea of a book with a storyline that featured Potter's Field (and the body farm, previously) would make it a bestseller and didn't consider how it fit with the plot... Either way I think it backfired because it just leaves me scratching my head as to what Potter's Field really has to do with anything.

I do think Cornwell's endings tend to be a bit rushed. 400 pages of build-up and escalating tension and then everything's over in a chapter and a one page epilogue (if that), it all feels a bit abrupt and like she gets to the end of her books and after all that time and effort she just wants to get the book over and done with. After all the work I think the endings should be savoured, maybe steal 30-50 pages from the build-up and really give the end the time it deserves and add a decent epilogue (where appropriate) so we know how everything wrapped up properly.

Because the inappropriate title annoyed me as much with this one as it did with The Body Farm I had to deduct that same star, but fortunately there were no confusions with Lucy's age versus how many years were supposed to have passed. As soon as I finished this last night I picked up Cause of Death and read 100 pages of that before I could force myself to put it down and go to sleep. I'll likely finish that one tonight, very nearly a one-sitting read as Cosmopolitan suggests.

Ugh. Worst series ever. I gave Kay Scarpetta a heroic try, dragging myself through 6 awful books waiting for things to get better, but they never did. At least the boring Temple Gault (horrendous name by the way) is over and done with. I have so many gripes about this series it's hard to know where to begin.

First off, isn't she the medical examiner? Shouldn't she be doing more corpse examining? Why is she always running off somewhere to go investigate? I understand the consultant forensic pathologist role for the FBI, but she doesn't just lend her knowledge about the body she has to try to be a profiler and an investigator too. I don't know why the FBI has Benton or Marino when they could just keep Scarpetta full time.

Second, the characters suck. There is not one likeable person in this whole series. NOT ONE.
-Kay Scarpetta, rages and whines all day long about everything under the sun. Is snooty and moody, bitches about everything and puts herself in the dumbest situations I have ever read a main character doing. It is unbelievable to me that a medical examiner would have to kill so many people within their career much less in 6 years.
-Lucy, the niece. Totally gets her moodiness & bitchiness from her aunt. Her smart ass attitude and Kay's bragging about her genius (which only works for computers because in commonsense that girl is a dud - also something she inherited from her aunt) is tiresome. And of course, she must be a lesbian because her mother is an asshole. *eye roll*
-Marino, grumpy, overweight, overprotective and unattractive. 'Nuff said.
-Wesley Benton, emotionless adulterer who not only cheats on his wife (who is friends with Kay also) but cheats on his wife with his dead best friend's lover.

Thirdly (is that a word?), the stories all get so boring and long winded. There's so much talking about what they're going to do that when it finally happens it takes about 5 paragraphs and the whole thing is over. The books end so abruptly and begin the same way I always have to double check that I didn't miss a book in the series.

All in all I am done with this series for awhile, if not forever. I would much rather read Kathy Reichs. At least some of her characters are decent human beings.

Very solid.
"From Potter's Field" is a very authentic feeling forensic thriller, like many entries in this series. This was almost a 5/5 but the ending is very sudden and comes with almost no resolution after the action. With a gentler ending, maybe with a degree of softness or a moment between the characters, this would have been a 5/5.

Very solid serial killer thriller.
I will definitely be continuing onward with this series.

I unfortunately hate Pete Marino. Can he go on vacation for the next few books??

Dr.Scarpetta keeps on mixing the personal and professional.. there is no way she can stop doing it,isn't it?

This is one of her decent works-neither very good not bad.. there isn't any of the classic detective work,if you are looking for one. Even the killer do not have a well-developed psyche. If a profiler tries to work on Cornwell's killers,he would end up nowhere. Psychology is almost non-existent in this work and so it sort of feels hollow considering we are talking of a serial killer here. This book is something which you should go for if you have a few hours stuck somewhere and do not have anything else to do.

From Potters Field was the first Cornwell novel I read, and it didn't make sense. I couldn't connect with the characters and so, I went back to the beginning of the series and I get it now. So, if you're coming in at this point, stop and go back to Postmortem.

This is another 5 star entry in the Kay Scarpetta series. I read a few books in this series years ago but opted to start over as I don't remember anything from before. This is a very exciting book with some great suspense and a very well thought out plot. Each of the main characters are very memorable to me. Kay, Lucy and Marino are all very strong characters. Cornwell is also quite good at writing characters that annoy the hell out of me - characters I love to hate. There was only one thing that bugged me and it didn't diminish my enjoyment of the book in the least but I couldn't help thinking about it is: Why was Marino there? A local cop from Virginia is brought to NYC to work on a federal case? If there was a reason behind that, I missed it and it doesn't make sense to me. Oh, well. I still loved the book. Thumbs up!

The brutal murder of a homeless Jane Doe in the middle of Central Park has all the signs of the serial killer Temple Gault. This starts a chain of events that inevitably pulls in Dr. Kay Scarpetta, the Chief Medical Officer of Virginia, who has personal experience and knowledge of Gault, as he has escaped her attempts at capture twice now.

Thus begins the sixth book in Patricia Cornwell’s phenomenal series of thrillers to feature her intrepid coroner, “From Potter’s Field”.

Gault is toying with Scarpetta, being so brash as to leave one of his fresh victim’s body in her own morgue, making her job site a crime scene. He has also found a way to hack into the FBI’s latest criminal profiling program, which was designed by Scarpetta’s niece, Lucy.

Scarpetta also knows that Gault is de-compensating—-an FBI term that simply means that he’s getting sloppier in his excitement to up the ante. Sloppy killers get caught easier, but they can also wreak a lot of deadly havoc before they do.

Of course, Scarpetta can wreak her own brand of havoc, too.

Cornwell’s series just gets better and better with each book. I can’t read them fast enough.

3,5

This book is completely focused on capturing the serial killer who has made appearances in the last few books.
One point of interest for me was that the killers parents had moved to the area I grew up in Beaufort, SC and the author went into some of the Gullah culture of the area. That wasn't essential to the story, but it was still pretty interesting/cool that it was added.