Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
30 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
Help me I can't deal with this misery anymore, 30 Dec 2007
As is the case for many of the reviewers of this book, I have been a big fan of Scarpetta since Lucy was a precocious brat and Marino had self respect. Slowly, over the years, the stories have weakened and more often the reader has found themselves contending with the social issues of the main characters over the chance of a good story. I am still reading this, the latest chapter in the Scarpetta saga and the question i ask myself is WHY?, why has Cornwell written this book, for it is not a story, it is a trial, it tests your commitment to the characters who you have followed for so long. Why am i still reading? because I can't believe that there isnt some sort of story lurking in the last few pages. This is without a doubt the worst book in the series if not the worst I have read in years. Cornwell needs to pull her self together and decide what she is going to do with this series, because I for one am unlikely to buy the next one and if it continues in this vein I will definately make that the last.
|
|
|
30 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
EXTREME DISAPPOINTMENT, 29 Nov 2007
I have been an absolute fan of Patricia Cornwell and shared and bought many copies for friends! The last two or three books that Patricia has written have been increasingly disappointing! I have so looked forward to the characters, Pete Marino and Benton Wesley, and Lucy! But her latest book, Book of the Dead is so so awful! I am perservering with it, simply because I don't want to say I haven't finished a Patricia Cornwell book!
Please convey to her that she should try and get back some of the great story telling, thriller-type, forensic-based fiction that made me one of her biggest fans!
I have never actually written a review of a book but I just felt so disappointed this time!
Pat
Thank you!
|
|
|
43 of 51 people found the following review helpful:
this book doesn't really measure up to earlier offerings by Cornwell, 17 Nov 2007
Kay Scarpetta and her romantic interest, fellow pathologist Benton Wesley, are in Rome, Italy, where they are consultants assisting the International Investigative Response, a branch of the European Network of Forensic Science Institutes. The case-at-hand is the murder of a beautiful young tennis star, American Drew Martin; her horribly mutilated body was discovered near the Piazza Navona. Italian officials, the FBI, and - of course Scarpetta - are eager to solve this most mysterious and most heinous crime. However, there are very few sensible clues. Bizarre evidence, which is slowly revealed in protracted exposition and helter-skelter narrative, points to a probable serial killer who has been given the moniker The Sandman because of his perverse placement of sand (from some mysterious, unidentifiable location) into the eye-sockets of his victims.
Meanwhile, having hit an apparent dead-end - at least for the time being - in the Drew Martin murder investigation in Rome, Scarpetta, formerly of Richmond, Virginia (at least until her abrupt departure under unpleasant circumstances), returns to her home and office in Charleston, South Carolina, where she - and her investigative assistant, the unpredictable Pete Marino - become involved in investigating another (seemingly unrelated) case, the murder of a young boy. Then things get more and more complicated for Scarpetta (and for Cornwell's readers) as Dr. Marilyn Self ('the most famous psychiatrist in the world' and Scarpetta's relentless nemesis), Shandy Snook (Marino's latest romantic challenge and the unrestrained daughter of a potato chip tycoon), Scarpetta's niece Lucy (all grown-up and extraordinarily resourceful), and assorted other characters (both major and minor, eccentric and ordinary) converge in a slowly evolving case that involves plenty of intriguing relationships and more than a few surprises - especially in the final pages which contain the solution to Cornwell's 405 page enigma. I'd recommend reading the old Scarpetta novels instead.
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
(12)
£9.82
(54)
£11.99
See all Product Description
(7)
£8.64
(3)
£6.49
(69 customer reviews)
(
