A Feast of Carrion (Unabridged) [Audio Download]

This is a challenging book to read. The vocabulary sometimes requires a dictionary. Some, but very little, is quite graphic and appropriately graphic--nothing gratuitous. The author takes the world as it is: with incompetent cops, often caring only for promotion and sexual comforts; intelligent professors and doctors doing bad things, unalloyed bad things. The story moves along at a steady pace. This can be read like a Patricia C. forensic book, but would make little sense. This first novel educated me, thrilled me, entertained me, but most of all immersed me in the grease and grime of life and made me look unflinchingly at some truths about the human condition, which many myster readers would like to ignore. Not since I read Connelly's The Poet have I been so overwhelmed by mystery/suspense story. Essential reading.

Having read all of Keith McCarthy's subsequent thrillers, I finally felt impelled to pick up "A Feast of Carrion," the first and most intense installment in the series. McCarthy introduces British pathologist John Eisenmenger, a compassionate and sensitive individual who is unlucky in love. He has already been through a divorce, and he currently lives with an unstable and often enraged woman named Marie, who is not only jealous, but also paranoid and needy. Previously, John suffered a breakdown after witnessing the terrible death of a little girl named Tamsin at the hand of her mother, and he has never been able to forget the indelible image of this dying youngster. Her face haunts him and he even visits her pathetic grave to grieve from time to time.

John's life is about to get even more unsettled. He works in St. Benjamin's Museum of Anatomy and Pathology, where a crime takes place that is so gruesome that it almost defies description. A gorgeous medical student named Nikki Exner is found hanged and grotesquely mutilated in the museum. Who could have been sick enough to do such a thing to this young woman? Sleazy but sly Beverley Wharton, an ambitious Chief Inspector who has slept her way to the top, is convinced that the assistant curator of the museum, Tim Bilroth, formerly known as Tim Bowman, is the guilty party. After all, Bowman had motive, means and opportunity. He has a prison record for indecent assault and rape, and he is a drug dealer who knew Exner well. Relying on the results of a poorly done autopsy as well as her copper's intuition, Wharton arrests Bowman on suspicion of killing Exner. Subsequently, Bowman's parents hire a solicitor named Helena Flemming to clear their son's name. Helena asks John Eisenmenger to conduct a second autopsy on Exner in an attempt to find out what really happened. John is reluctant to get involved in forensic pathology again, but he is attracted to Helena, and he agrees to take another look at the Exner case.

"A Feast of Carrion" is a gory and unflinching novel, filled with excruciatingly detailed information on body parts and autopsies. It is also compulsively readable and highly literate. McCarthy's descriptive writing is fabulous; he captures a mood, a scene, or a character's personality with a few well-chosen words. His sardonic humor is often hilarious, and the author dissects each person in his cast as skillfully as Eisenmenger dissects corpses with his scalpel. McCarthy's conclusion is a cliffhanger and then some. My one quibble is the plot, which is incredibly intricate. There are too many perpetrators committing adultery, exchanging favors for sex, falsifying records, earning money through blackmail, and much more, requiring a scorecard to keep track of them all. The novel also features a host of individuals who are physically and mentally ill, a bit too many to be believed. However, the dialogue is top-notch, and the forensic information could not be more graphic, for those who enjoy that sort of thing. I advise you to read this book on an EMPTY stomach.

I urge readers who are new to McCarthy to read the novels in order. The author provides little back-story, and you will not understand how the characters evolved if you read the series out of order. Now that I have the whole picture, I understand a bit more about how and why John and Helena's inner demons have tormented them for so many years.

A Feast of Carrion is a well written tale of lust, perversion, and murder in a pathology department in the UK. McCarthy is a splendid wordsmith, and his dry and witty writing style are well suited to the storyline and setting. Happily, this starts off an entertaining trio of books starring the nomad forensic pathologist John Eisenmenger and his lovely attorney-assistant Helena Flemming.

In this tale, a gruesome murder is committed and displayed in the hallowed center of the anatomy and pathology museum on a medical school campus. The police, and later our protagonists, investigate what seems more and more like an inside job--not a paranoid schizophrenic on PCP who broke into the museum to harm a helpless medical student.

Strong points: the writing, the writing, and the writing. Also, the characters are deftly drawn and handled well. McCarthy's thoughtful portraits set up a nice cast of characters for the books to come in this series. I certainly think the medical expertise helps me enjoy this gruesome caper a bit more, although naming most of the characters and street names after historically famous medical people can sometimes be a bit distracting (if you have a medical background and recognize them...).

The weaknesses in this story are few but real. There are too many deaths/suicides to be quite believeable, and there are too many unethical and immoral professors of pathology to be believable (though perhaps Dr. McCarthy, a pathologist himself, gets a kick out of doing this!). Overall, this is a strong debut in a writing style not too far removed from Reginald Hill--thoughtful, educated readers will enjoy it if they have the stomach for the anatomic details.