1999;
527 pages. Book #10 (out of 22) of the Scarpetta series.
New Author? : Yes. Genre : Murder-Mystery;
Thriller. Overall Rating : 7*/10.
The freight ship Sirius has just arrived in Richmond harbor from
Antwerp, and has some curious cargo to declare. A body, quite decomposed, is lying in one of
the shipping containers.
Kay Scarpetta, Chief Medical Examiner, has the unenviable task of securing and investigating the crime scene, collecting the body, transporting it to the
morgue, and trying to determine the cause of death. And while she’s at it, see if she can
determine the identity of the victim.
She does have one clue already, though.
A message, presumably from the killer, scrawled on the inside of the
container. It reads “Bon voyage, le loup-garou”.
French, eh? I wonder what a
loup-garou is.
Oh
crap, it means “werewolf”.
What’s To Like...
There are three storylines to keep track of in Black Notice. There’s the crime investigation itself, which
is why people read Patricia Cornwell books.
There’s Scarpetta’s personal life, which is why people read the Scarpetta series
in order. And there’s the “office
politics” tale, which involves petty thefts, bogus e-mails, and backstabbing
bosses and coworkers.
All
the characters were new to me, since I haven’t read any other books in this
series. Scarpetta is the protagonist, of
course, but I suspect Lucy and Police Captain Marino are recurring characters. Marino has the ability to be both annoying
and charming at the same time.
I
especially liked the technical parts of Scarpetta’s job. I was reminded of the old Jack Klugman TV
series Quincy M.E., but television has to
present “sanitized” versions of things like autopsies. Here, we get to “see” the real life of a
Medical Examiner. Ripping open chest
cavities, removing and weighing organs, inserting rectal thermometers,
etc. Fun times.
This is a first-person POV story.
Scarpetta and Marino do a lot of smoking and drinking, which seemed to fit with the setting. Ditto for the
frequent cussing. Since it was written
in 1999, some of the details are outdated – businesses use AOL as their e-mail
service provider, the Concordes are still flying, and faxing is the best way to
send documents to someone else. Wowza. And FWIW, the syndrome featured here,
hypertrichosis, is a real, albeit rare, malady.
Kewlest New Word ...
Soporific (adj.)
: tending to induce drowsiness or sleep.
Others : Avulsed
(v.)
Excerpts...
“What time did
Detective Anderson show up this morning?” I asked him.
His answer was to
go around flipping on light boxes. They
glowed blankly along the upper walls.
“Sorry I’m
late. I was on the phone. My wife’s sick,” he went on.
He has used his
wife as an excuse so many times by now that she was chronically ill or a
hypochondriac, had Munchausen syndrome or was almost dead. (pg. 107)
”You’ll really
like this café,” he said. “It’s a
secret. You’ll see. No one in here speaks anything but French and
if you don’t speak French, you have to point on the menu or get out your little
dictionary, and the owner will be amused by you. Odette is very no-nonsense but very nice.”
I was scarcely
hearing a word.
“She and I have a
détente. If she’s pleasant, I patronize her establishment. If I’m pleasant, she lets me patronize her
establishment.” (pg.
443)
“You think we might ever
convince Dr. Carmichael that ‘cardiac arrest’ is not a cause of death? Everyone’s heart stops when he dies. The question is why did it stop.” (pg.
92)
There
were some slow spots. In the first half
of the book, most of the attention is on the office politics angle and the
stress in Kay’s personal life. If you’re
reading the book for the murder-mystery, things will drag at times. Just hang in there; the second half is all
about the killer and his bloody spree.
The
main disappointment for me with Black Notice
was its ending, which felt rushed and clunky.
Our killer is on the loose, with Richmond’s finest searching for him, so
where does he go? You guessed it,
Scarpetta’s house, where our plucky ME handles him with tension-lacking
ease. To boot, the resolution of the
office politics storyline is abrupt and unbelievably convenient. It’s almost as if the author got tired of the
story around page 500, and decided to wrap things up as quickly as possible.
Nevertheless
Black Notice was a page-turner for me, which
says something about Cornwell’s writing ability. And who knows, maybe I just picked one her
weaker storytelling efforts to start with.
I don’t think I’ll commit to reading the other 21 books in order, but
Kay Scarpetta is sufficiently intriguing to merit reading some more books in the cases.
7 Stars. Add
1 star if you are reading this series in order.
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