The Trial of 'Body of Evidence' by Patricia Cornwell (Kay Scarpetta #2)

*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. 

The Trial of 'Postmortem' by Patricia Cornwell (Kay Scarpetta #1)

*This review will contain spoilers* 

'Postmortem' was Patricia Cornwell's debut novel, released back in 1990. Reading this 25 years on, is it still relevant or is it quite obviously dated?

The novel begins with the murder of Lori Petersen - the fourth victim of a serial killer who is tormenting the Richmond area. The murderer's MO is exactly the same as in the first three cases; he ties his victims up, rapes them and kills them, then disappears without a trace. Dr. Kay Scarpetta is shaken up by Lori's murder because she was a medical student, and Kay struggles to get past the similarities in their lives up until this point.

Throughout the first half of the novel, a lot of time is spent introducing the characters. Kay gets the majority of the screen time as the protagonist, which is to be expected. A serious work-orientated woman, Kay has her niece, Lucy, staying with her at the time of the fourth murder and she ponders whether it's fair on the child to keep her around at such a trying time. Kay has never had a family of her own, much to the chagrin of her mother, and though she cares for Lucy she finds it difficult to juggle the position of surrogate mother with her hectic work life. A highly introspective character, she often finds herself losing her train of thought, and will fade out in the middle of a conversation just to be jolted back to awareness. 

As well as Kay's development, there is also a lot of focus on the character of Detective Marino - the chief investigator in charge of the case. Marino is a hard-ass: having worked in New York he knows his stuff, but he's also very affronted by the idea of being bossed around by a woman, making the dynamic between him and Kay frictional at least. Marino automatically assumes Lori Petersen's husband, Matt, is the murderer, and he quickly gets his mindset focused on proving his suspicions. 

Other than these two characters, there's quite a large supporting cast: Abby Turnball the scrappy journalist, Margaret the computer programmer, Wingo the gay autopsy technician, Rose the receptionist and Bill, Kay's romantic interest. These characters aren't fully-rounded, just popping up in the text as and when they are needed, but as this series is so long I'm assuming we will get more information and back story from them in the coming novels.

The second half of the novel focuses more on the discovery of the serial killer, culminating in a fast-paced action scene in the last twenty pages of the novel. The killer is discovered to be one Roy McCorkle, a twenty-seven year old man who worked as a 911 operator and dispatcher. Roy suffers from Maple Syrup Urine Disease, which causes a build-up of amino acids in the body and leads to the sufferer having a syrupy sickly smell surrounding them when they are under physical or emotional stress. Due to the nature of his crimes, McCorkle was stressed constantly while performing his ritualistic murders, and after dumping his jumpsuit in a nearby trash can the disease seems to be the only possible explanation for the scent emanating from it. Using his disease against him, Kay and Abby work together to craft a newspaper article that will coax the murderer to make a mistake, and that mistake is realised when McCorkle attempts to murder Kay and is shot down by Detective Marino. Case closed. 

Evidence:

The first time I read 'Postmortem', I absolutely loved it. It was the first book of this genre, the first book of this magnitude, that I had ever experienced and it hooked me from the first page, giving me nightmares every night while I was reading it. 

Now, it could be because this is a re-read, or because I have read a lot more crime fiction since the first time I read this novel, but I didn't find it nearly as effective the second time around. I couldn't remember any of the plot twists and turns, so I didn't have the ending spoiled for me, but it just didn't seem as well written as I once believed that it was. 

Take, for example, Kay. Constantly fading out in the middle of conversations: 'I'd been scarcely aware of his pulling off the road and parking' and 'I suddenly realized Marino was talking to me' being just two minor examples of a constantly recurring character flaw. Having a protagonist ruminate on their inner thoughts isn't a bad thing - in fact, it's probably necessary when we're all trying to work out who the serial killer could be - but if it interrupts with the flow of the storytelling and makes it feel as though we're stopping and starting constantly, it's not a positive thing. Similarly, Kay has very ingrained depreciating thoughts about men, meaning that at a few times in this novel it feels like she's taking criticism as being because she's a woman rather than because she might have messed up, which seems a bit incomprehensible in the face of some of the accusations thrown at her. 

As well as an annoying lead character, the discovery of the serial killer is a massive disappointment. Marino is convinced that the murderer is Matt Petersen, then he believes it may be Bill Boltz the boyfriend, but when it's eventually revealed that it's a character we've had no interaction with in the past it feels like a cheap escape clause. For someone who likes a cerebral read, trying to spot the red herrings against the genuine clues throughout the novel, to have no chance of guessing who performed the crime was a huge disappointment. It also feels as though the two previous suspects aren't investigated as thoroughly as they could be. At the end of the novel, we receive the information that Matt Petersen passed a polygraph, but because we don't get the information at the time it feels as though it's a loose end throughout. Similarly, Marino questions the likelihood of Bill being the murderer, but it never goes further than sheer speculation (despite the fact that he quickly goes on an impromptu holiday across country) and it would have been interesting to see that developed more thoroughly. 

Something else that hampered my enjoyment of the novel was that you could definitely feel how dated it was. I appreciated that in my first reading, but this time it felt clunky and the fact that DNA usage in crimes was only in the first stages means that if this book was written now the crime would definitely be solved a lot faster than it was. This book is a complete Zeitgeist to the early nineties: people smoke everywhere, there are a lot of inappropriate terms thrown around about the gay community (such as 'Maybe he was having an HIV test done on the sly. Good God, don't let him have AIDs' proving exactly how ignorant even the medical community were towards gay people two decades ago) and a lot of language that is verging on racist. It's definitely interesting to get in-depth information about the medical procedures that they're going through, but to get so much information about dumb monitors and the SQL database... Nowadays, computers are a lot more up-to-date and more people know common knowledge about them, so it seems a bit unnecessary on reflection.  

Verdict:

I enjoyed 'Postmortem' the first time I read it, but this time around it fell flat. That might be because it's a re-read, so I can't unconditionally state that if this was my first read I wouldn't have loved it. I recommend reading this novel because it's so famous - Patricia Cornwell is a household name, and this is the book that launched her career, so if you haven't read it before it's not something that you should just pass over. However, at this point in time I'm feeling rather disappointed, and I'm definitely apprehensive about continuing on with my Kay Scarpetta marathon (even though I'm obviously going to follow through!). 

I'm sentencing this book to a three star review.