Flesh And Blood

Super Sniper

It is an unwritten rule of the thriller: when an elaborate meal is cooked, it won’t be eaten; if a holiday has been planned with great effort, it will be cancelled. If a character has a birthday, the day will be wrecked.

All of the above happen to Dr Kay Scarpetta, Patricia Cornwell’s gusty forensic investigator heroine, when she is in the mood for romance with her husband, Benton Wesley of the FBI, in her 22^nd novel in this series. Dr Scarpetta first appeared in the rather obviously titled Post Mortem in 1990, and hasn’t stopped since.

While she is lovingly whipping up an exotic meal, and getting set to leave for a Florida vacation to celebrate her birthday, she notices seven pennies on a wall behind their Cambridge house. They are copper coins all dated 1981 and shining like new. She remembers receiving a weirdly sinister poem by a person who has the Twitter handle, Copperhead.

 As she ponders over this, her colleague, Detective Pete Marino calls to tell of her of the murder of a school teacher nearby, by a sniper. Nobody saw anything; the man was unloading groceries from his car when he simply fell down dead.

Marino suspects that this murder connects two others with a similar modus operandi and a common factor—special copper bullets. There is seemingly no connection between the three victims, so there is no pattern to be discerned.  There is no way of predicting where the sniper will strike next, though Dr Scarpetta suspects her family is on the killer’s radar.

Her holiday is cancelled, husband and niece Lucy (who happens to be gay, and yes, that is a clue) get involved in the pursuit of the sniper—Lucy being the super efficient ex-FBI operative, whose skills with helicopters, guns and computers are unparalleled.

Then, a teenager is found dead in the pool of a senator’s empty mansion, a creepy insurance investigator pops up, the latest victim’s wife is hiding something. And to make matters – and traffic—worse, President Obama is about to visit the town, and there is tension all around. This is soon after the Boston marathon bombings and racist feelings run high—so there could be a terrorist or vigilante angle to the last killing.

Cornwell spreads around a lot of police and forensic procedures and red herrings. It takes some stretching of the  imagination to connect the dots, and think like the unhinged killer, who plays mind games with Dr Scarpetta and the others working on the case.

Dr Scarpetta keeps having hunches and feelings in the pit of her stomach, while Lucy hacks away into the depths of the internet to get impossible-to-find information. 

There are many dry pages of ‘how-it’s-done’ and the gruesome autopsy passages that are not for the squeamish—but then why would they pick up a book about a forensics expert?

Flesh And Blood

By Patricia Cornwell

Publiser: William Morrow

Pages: 369