Not her best. Slow going and a bit turgid.

Foi a minha estreia com esta série e com esta autora e, talvez em parte por minha culpa, soube-me a pouco.

Assumo esta parte de culpa uma vez que li este livro isoladamente mesmo sabendo que é o sexto de uma série, o que pode ter contribuído para nunca me ter conseguido sentir suficientemente envolvida com as personagens e com a própria história (até porque, já depois da leitura, vi em algumas reviews que o caso que aqui se resolve já tinha "aparecido" em alguns dos livros anteriores). No entanto, o próprio desfecho ficou aquém das (minhas) expectativas...

É um livro leve, de leitura rápida, e reconheço que conseguiu, em alguns momentos, aguçar um pouco mais a minha curiosidade, mas por agora não sei se me apetecerá ler outro desta série.

Listen, I'm a fan, right? But, man, that ending sucked! Just saying. What happened? For 400 pages there is an exciting build-up of anxiety and anticipation, and then....it is as if Patricia Cornwell got a phone call from the publisher telling her to send in the manuscript NOW. So she concluded it all in one paragraph. Thud.

Anyway.

Gentle reader, this is the not the book where you want to start reading, if you are interested in the Dr. Kay Scarpetta series. You should start here: Postmortem. There are intense ongoing personal and family issues that are carried forward from book to book. Plus, this particular book in the series, #6, is the third in the series which has been about a particularly vicious psychopath who has been stalking Scarpetta. He was introduced in Cruel & Unusual., #4.

This is a fantastically fun mystery series, and I love it. It IS graphic, but not gratuitously. I don't know what happened to cause the ending in this novel to be so obviously truncated as if the last chapter got chewed up by a dog or something (maybe Cornwell had a personal emergency?) but this isn't typical at all of the books.

4/5

scarpetta once again locks horns with her archnemesis temple gault, who previously appeared in the body farm committing brutal murders and confounding the investigators before eventually escaping. in this follow-up, gault reappears and he might have a partner- scarpetta's niece lucy's former lover carrie grethen.

this scarpetta adventure is gruesome and bleak, as gault wreaks a bloody path across the eastern united states, with scarpetta, pete marino, benton wesley, and lucy farinelli hot on his trail. can the devious killer be stopped? or will he elude capture yet again?

yet another strong entry in the scarpetta series, as the medical examiner is targeted by gault and her personal entanglement with wesley continues to deepen. cornwell does a good job of balancing professional with personal, weaving a complicated, flawed, compelling character in kay scarpetta. in this, her sixth outing, the medical examiner hasn't yet lost her edge.