*This review will contain spoilers*
The second Kay Scarpetta novel starts off in a wildly different manner than 'Postmortem', the debut novel in the series. Beginning with a prologue, we read two letters written by a Beryl Madison and addressed to a mysterious 'M'. Beryl discusses her fear of someone coming into her room while she is asleep and the fact that she doesn't want to return to Richmond, painting an image of a woman scared out of her skin.
When the main bulk of the story starts, it's evident why Beryl was so scared: on the night that she returned to Richmond, she was brutally slain at her home. Bloodstains mark the walls and floor throughout her home, as she had attempted to escape from the knife-wielding killer. However, Beryl had a state of the art burglar alarm system that she had reset after inviting her murderer into her home, so questions abound as to why she would have let him into her house when she was so terrified of this exact possibility.
Beryl Madison was an author and, as a young girl,was mentored by Pulitzer Prize winner Cary Harper. As details emerge that Beryl's most recent project was an autobiography, questions circulate as to whether Cary could be her murderer - did things happen in her youth that it's in his best interest to cover up? This situation is made even more likely when it's revealed that Cary had a contract with Beryl forcing her into silence, which she has broken by deciding to write her memoir. However, when Cary also turns up dead - his head bashed in after returning from a night out at his local pub - everything goes up into the air once more. Following Cary's death, Sterling Harper - his sister - commits suicide, but it takes them a while to learn how (due to the similarities between dextromethorphan and levomethorphan), and her suicide is followed by the suicide of Al Hunt, a car wash attendant who met Beryl a couple of times while she was alive. Al was a psychiatric patient, so there's a question as to whether he could have been the killer, but when his alibi is solid things take another confusing turn. Before his suicide, Al discusses an old friend - Frankie - with Kay, telling her some rather gruesome stories, and this gets Kay thinking there could be more to this connection than meets the eye.
With Beryl's agent putting pressure on Kay to find the missing manuscript or risk getting sued, Kay takes leave from her office and starts attempting to investigate and question people who could be involved. Knowing that Al was a psychiatric patient, she starts off at Valhalla - the hospital where he was interred - and after discovering there was a fellow patient called Frank, Kay puts two and two together and solves the murder pretty easily. Frankie was a paranoid schizophrenic whose mother turned up dead a couple of years ago, and while they can't find him or a connection between him and Beryl it's pretty much accepted that he was her murderer.
Frankie doesn't appear directly until the last few pages of the novel (again, in a similar way to 'Postmortem') and he doesn't last very long after he appears, being shot to pieces by Kay in her entry hall. Frankie worked as a bag attendant at the local airport, which is where he first interacted with Beryl Madison. After becoming obsessed with her, he stole her bag off of the baggage claim, then took it to her home later that night - this being the reason that she trusted him enough to let him into her home. Frankie steals Beryl's manuscript after brutally murdering her, then proceeds to kill the people closest to her (namely Cary Harper, who it is revealed molested Beryl consistently throughout her teenage years). After fixating on Kay, who develops a strong bond with Beryl following her murder, Frankie pulls the same stunt on her - stealing her bag from the baggage claim - but because she works out what is going on (after letting him into her house) she takes him out without many problems.
Evidence:
I really hope the synopsis I've written above makes some sense, because for the majority of this novel I was just wandering around in a dazed and confused state. It seems pretty obvious that Cary Harper is Beryl's murderer - then he turns up dead. So it must have been her agent! But there's nothing to say that he would have been in Richmond at the time of her death, and if he'd murdered her he wouldn't be making such a fuss about finding her manuscript. So it must be Al Hunt, the car wash attendee - the killer leaves lots of car carpet fibres on her body, and he would have been covered in them! ...But no, it's not him, because he was out with his parents when both murders occurred. So it must be Frankie, his old friend from the psychiatric hospital, who just happened to have both dealt with Beryl Madison's bags at the luggage claim and bumped into her at his old friend's car wash. Yeah, that makes some sense.
I don't know if I'm getting cranky about the Kay Scarpetta novels because the killers are being pulled out of thin air, but I wasn't too happy about how this one played out either. In 'Postmortem', the killer randomly appears at the end after not being mentioned at all throughout the novel, and while Frankie got some mentions it still didn't feel like a proper murder mystery. For example, they make a big deal about Frankie having a stutter, but Beryl Madison never mentioned this while reporting his threatening phone calls. Similarly, when Kay first receives a phone call from him, she doesn't mention his stutter either, but after they're told that he has one all of his speech is wr-wri-written l-li-like th-this. It feels convoluted and badly crafted: if someone has a stutter while nervous or under stress, make it a consistent character trait rather than something that pops up too late in the book to make any sense.
Furthermore, I just think there were too many loose ends for this to be considered a great story. Yes, they were all wrapped up by the end but because they were kept dangling throughout the book it was hard to keep track of everything. Sparacino - Beryl's evil and corrupt agent - is mentioned consistently throughout the first half of the novel but then there's a hundred page section where his name doesn't crop up at all; this meant that I'd completely forgotten about him and the story felt disjointed. The same can be said about Mark James, Kay's ex-boyfriend, who she ruminated upon regularly but who didn't have that much of an effect on the plot.
Because the first novel focused so much on character development, this second installment is much more plot based - the only expansion we get on Kay's character is the introduction of Mark. He has a rather elusive back story and there's a lot of debate surrounding his character (is he a spy? An agent? A lawyer? A criminal?) and while that gets resolved by the end it takes a long time and it makes it very difficult to care - he just feels like a poor excuse to write in a romantic interest and add some more tension into the story. If Mark doesn't crop up again in future novels I'm going to feel rather cheated - the novel ends on him inviting Kay to Aspen and declaring his love for her, so it feels as though there needs to be more reference to him; if he's not seen again, it's going to mean he was a completely unnecessary inclusion.
As well as Kay not being developed much, Detective Marino's character is also left as he was in the first book, with the exception of some much more abrasively homophobic comments. None of the other characters are expanded upon because of the fact that most of them end up dead. Rose, the secretary at Kay's office, frequently drops off telephone messages, and Benton Wesley from the first novel crops up again - other than these two we have new characters being added consistently and being left undeveloped, so it makes it hard to care about the group of characters as a whole.
I will admit, I did cheer a little bit when Kay shot and killed Frankie at the end of the novel - it was good to see her actually being a badass, rather than just ruminating on the fact that she has a gun and could use it if the situation arose. However, because the killer was murdered at the end of 'Postmortem' and we've now had another one shot down, it does feel like the apprehension rate of the Richmond PD must be pretty low - it would be good to get the why they did it and how from the killers, rather than just the other characters speculating. At the moment it just feels like there's a formula Patricia Cornwell is sticking to, so I hope she shakes it up over the next installments.
Verdict:
I can't remember much about 'Body of Evidence' from the first time I read it - in fact, I could only remember Sterling Harper's death. This meant I was rather surprised when Cary Harper was murdered: he was definitely my number one suspect. However, from the first chapter I kept thinking "it's likely that Beryl left her manuscript with someone she trusted down in Key West - someone should go and check it out". Did they? Eventually. But if Kay had just headed down to Key West earlier in the novel, all of this could have been resolved much more quickly, so it did feel rather unnecessary.
I still enjoy Patricia Cornwell's writing. The little scientific explanation of the different between dextromethorphan and levomethorphan definitely intrigued me, which is something that science doesn't normally do - you can tell that Patricia knows what she's talking about in those situations. However, I can imagine that that would get on some people's nerves - a lot of people don't want to feel as though they're taking chemistry lessons while reading a novel. Some of Kay's annoying traits from the first novel had dissipated (she complained about men a lot less, and she didn't fade out from conversations as frequently) which was a positive thing; hopefully she will continue to develop into a more likable character.
On the whole, this book ended up disappointing me. This was a re-read so, again, that could be why, but it just felt like it was a whole lot of nothing. I'm still continuing on with my Patricia Cornwell read-a-thon, but I'm just hoping that the next novel, 'All That Remains', will interest me more because I haven't read it yet - it will be the first book in this read-a-thon that I'm going into with no previous knowledge or expectations. I still feel as though we should get a least some interaction with the killer before they turn up and get shot to death, because then we can make up our minds for ourselves rather than just being told "oh yes this man is the killer". It also feels as though the killers need to stop getting as obsessed with Kay - for two in a row to be giving her freaky phone calls and appearing at her house to murder her just seems a little bit unnecessary.
When the main bulk of the story starts, it's evident why Beryl was so scared: on the night that she returned to Richmond, she was brutally slain at her home. Bloodstains mark the walls and floor throughout her home, as she had attempted to escape from the knife-wielding killer. However, Beryl had a state of the art burglar alarm system that she had reset after inviting her murderer into her home, so questions abound as to why she would have let him into her house when she was so terrified of this exact possibility.
Beryl Madison was an author and, as a young girl,was mentored by Pulitzer Prize winner Cary Harper. As details emerge that Beryl's most recent project was an autobiography, questions circulate as to whether Cary could be her murderer - did things happen in her youth that it's in his best interest to cover up? This situation is made even more likely when it's revealed that Cary had a contract with Beryl forcing her into silence, which she has broken by deciding to write her memoir. However, when Cary also turns up dead - his head bashed in after returning from a night out at his local pub - everything goes up into the air once more. Following Cary's death, Sterling Harper - his sister - commits suicide, but it takes them a while to learn how (due to the similarities between dextromethorphan and levomethorphan), and her suicide is followed by the suicide of Al Hunt, a car wash attendant who met Beryl a couple of times while she was alive. Al was a psychiatric patient, so there's a question as to whether he could have been the killer, but when his alibi is solid things take another confusing turn. Before his suicide, Al discusses an old friend - Frankie - with Kay, telling her some rather gruesome stories, and this gets Kay thinking there could be more to this connection than meets the eye.
With Beryl's agent putting pressure on Kay to find the missing manuscript or risk getting sued, Kay takes leave from her office and starts attempting to investigate and question people who could be involved. Knowing that Al was a psychiatric patient, she starts off at Valhalla - the hospital where he was interred - and after discovering there was a fellow patient called Frank, Kay puts two and two together and solves the murder pretty easily. Frankie was a paranoid schizophrenic whose mother turned up dead a couple of years ago, and while they can't find him or a connection between him and Beryl it's pretty much accepted that he was her murderer.
Frankie doesn't appear directly until the last few pages of the novel (again, in a similar way to 'Postmortem') and he doesn't last very long after he appears, being shot to pieces by Kay in her entry hall. Frankie worked as a bag attendant at the local airport, which is where he first interacted with Beryl Madison. After becoming obsessed with her, he stole her bag off of the baggage claim, then took it to her home later that night - this being the reason that she trusted him enough to let him into her home. Frankie steals Beryl's manuscript after brutally murdering her, then proceeds to kill the people closest to her (namely Cary Harper, who it is revealed molested Beryl consistently throughout her teenage years). After fixating on Kay, who develops a strong bond with Beryl following her murder, Frankie pulls the same stunt on her - stealing her bag from the baggage claim - but because she works out what is going on (after letting him into her house) she takes him out without many problems.
Evidence:
I really hope the synopsis I've written above makes some sense, because for the majority of this novel I was just wandering around in a dazed and confused state. It seems pretty obvious that Cary Harper is Beryl's murderer - then he turns up dead. So it must have been her agent! But there's nothing to say that he would have been in Richmond at the time of her death, and if he'd murdered her he wouldn't be making such a fuss about finding her manuscript. So it must be Al Hunt, the car wash attendee - the killer leaves lots of car carpet fibres on her body, and he would have been covered in them! ...But no, it's not him, because he was out with his parents when both murders occurred. So it must be Frankie, his old friend from the psychiatric hospital, who just happened to have both dealt with Beryl Madison's bags at the luggage claim and bumped into her at his old friend's car wash. Yeah, that makes some sense.
I don't know if I'm getting cranky about the Kay Scarpetta novels because the killers are being pulled out of thin air, but I wasn't too happy about how this one played out either. In 'Postmortem', the killer randomly appears at the end after not being mentioned at all throughout the novel, and while Frankie got some mentions it still didn't feel like a proper murder mystery. For example, they make a big deal about Frankie having a stutter, but Beryl Madison never mentioned this while reporting his threatening phone calls. Similarly, when Kay first receives a phone call from him, she doesn't mention his stutter either, but after they're told that he has one all of his speech is wr-wri-written l-li-like th-this. It feels convoluted and badly crafted: if someone has a stutter while nervous or under stress, make it a consistent character trait rather than something that pops up too late in the book to make any sense.
Furthermore, I just think there were too many loose ends for this to be considered a great story. Yes, they were all wrapped up by the end but because they were kept dangling throughout the book it was hard to keep track of everything. Sparacino - Beryl's evil and corrupt agent - is mentioned consistently throughout the first half of the novel but then there's a hundred page section where his name doesn't crop up at all; this meant that I'd completely forgotten about him and the story felt disjointed. The same can be said about Mark James, Kay's ex-boyfriend, who she ruminated upon regularly but who didn't have that much of an effect on the plot.
Because the first novel focused so much on character development, this second installment is much more plot based - the only expansion we get on Kay's character is the introduction of Mark. He has a rather elusive back story and there's a lot of debate surrounding his character (is he a spy? An agent? A lawyer? A criminal?) and while that gets resolved by the end it takes a long time and it makes it very difficult to care - he just feels like a poor excuse to write in a romantic interest and add some more tension into the story. If Mark doesn't crop up again in future novels I'm going to feel rather cheated - the novel ends on him inviting Kay to Aspen and declaring his love for her, so it feels as though there needs to be more reference to him; if he's not seen again, it's going to mean he was a completely unnecessary inclusion.
As well as Kay not being developed much, Detective Marino's character is also left as he was in the first book, with the exception of some much more abrasively homophobic comments. None of the other characters are expanded upon because of the fact that most of them end up dead. Rose, the secretary at Kay's office, frequently drops off telephone messages, and Benton Wesley from the first novel crops up again - other than these two we have new characters being added consistently and being left undeveloped, so it makes it hard to care about the group of characters as a whole.
I will admit, I did cheer a little bit when Kay shot and killed Frankie at the end of the novel - it was good to see her actually being a badass, rather than just ruminating on the fact that she has a gun and could use it if the situation arose. However, because the killer was murdered at the end of 'Postmortem' and we've now had another one shot down, it does feel like the apprehension rate of the Richmond PD must be pretty low - it would be good to get the why they did it and how from the killers, rather than just the other characters speculating. At the moment it just feels like there's a formula Patricia Cornwell is sticking to, so I hope she shakes it up over the next installments.
Verdict:
I can't remember much about 'Body of Evidence' from the first time I read it - in fact, I could only remember Sterling Harper's death. This meant I was rather surprised when Cary Harper was murdered: he was definitely my number one suspect. However, from the first chapter I kept thinking "it's likely that Beryl left her manuscript with someone she trusted down in Key West - someone should go and check it out". Did they? Eventually. But if Kay had just headed down to Key West earlier in the novel, all of this could have been resolved much more quickly, so it did feel rather unnecessary.
I still enjoy Patricia Cornwell's writing. The little scientific explanation of the different between dextromethorphan and levomethorphan definitely intrigued me, which is something that science doesn't normally do - you can tell that Patricia knows what she's talking about in those situations. However, I can imagine that that would get on some people's nerves - a lot of people don't want to feel as though they're taking chemistry lessons while reading a novel. Some of Kay's annoying traits from the first novel had dissipated (she complained about men a lot less, and she didn't fade out from conversations as frequently) which was a positive thing; hopefully she will continue to develop into a more likable character.
On the whole, this book ended up disappointing me. This was a re-read so, again, that could be why, but it just felt like it was a whole lot of nothing. I'm still continuing on with my Patricia Cornwell read-a-thon, but I'm just hoping that the next novel, 'All That Remains', will interest me more because I haven't read it yet - it will be the first book in this read-a-thon that I'm going into with no previous knowledge or expectations. I still feel as though we should get a least some interaction with the killer before they turn up and get shot to death, because then we can make up our minds for ourselves rather than just being told "oh yes this man is the killer". It also feels as though the killers need to stop getting as obsessed with Kay - for two in a row to be giving her freaky phone calls and appearing at her house to murder her just seems a little bit unnecessary.
1 comments:
Hi there. I'm glad I found this entry, since I have just reached the middle of Scarpetta's second novel and honestly don't give a straw what happens next. Now I know I did the right thing in dumping the book unfinished. Your review spared me a bitter experience. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I will definitely come back often and go through your blog, which bears a fabulous name and slogan. =)
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