The Scarpetta Factor (Kay Scarpetta Series #17) Book

Somewhere in the 500-plus pages of this book is a good 300 page mystery struggling to get out. There were many points where I thought it would succeed, only to lose it again under the suffocating weight of each character's relentless self-absorption and analysis.

Since The Body Farm, Cornwell has increasingly given over her books to a sort of public self-examination. She uses the pages of the Scarpetta series to work out her own issues, turning her characters into a sort of Greek Chorus for her own troubled mind. A couple of years after that book and her life became more interesting than the murder-by-numbers serial-killerthons she was churning out. CSI mainstreamed her schtick and that also made her books seem less special. It has, over time, been actually more fascinating to skip the Scarpetta middleman and just read about the events in Cornwell's own life.

And when you do so it is plain to see just how much of the Scarpetta series, and especially this book, has become a great trick on the readers. We are paying anywhere from ten to twenty-five dollars to act as sounding boards for Cornwell's personal issues. If she's not comfortable with her own lesbian life, she'll take three or four books to deal with it via Lucy. If she's pissed off about losing $40 million in the stock market crash of 2008, she'll give over much of her 2009 book to demonise the people she claims to have stolen it. And if she marries a Harvard Psychiatry professor you can expect the novels start to drag under a relentless series of internal monologues for each of the characters. Internal monologues that sound depressingly, reduntantly similar regardless of the theoretical differences between those make-believe versions of Cornwell, her lovers, her enemies and her desires. And even though many authors believe that writing is a form of therapy the craft is to entertain and make beautiful the process.

Cornwell lacks the essence of writerly craft. Her prose is heavy; reading it is like chewing through cement. She long ago lost the thread of story. And I'm truly sorry because I had, once upon a time, enjoyed her books immensely. At least I can say they now serve a higher purpose. They are an object lesson for any writer as to what happens when you take yourself too seriously.