Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
Another Great Read, 3 May 2004
Kay is called to a murder of a reporter, Ted Eddings on New Year's Eve. The body is found underwater, which gives the reader Kay's first underwater crime scene. This cases pulls together Lucy, Pete and Benton as further murders follow. The story weaves in the usual dectective work with the high tec world of Lucy. As with all Scarpetta novels, the lives of the characters have significantly moved on since the last novel, you are only given snipbits of information at a time to try and piece together what has happened in the intervening time period. Another great novel. The relationship between the key characters just gets better and better and there is a part of me that is routing for Marino and Kay to get it toegther - who knows....??
|
|
|
9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
Cause of Death, 21 Jan 2005
After rattling through this, the seventh, instalment in the Dr Kay Scarpetta series, I had the blinding revelation that I'd done all this before. Although the book is just as solidly written and accurate as all the others, it is basically the same plot with slightly different scenery. Here you have Scarpetta on the trail of the perpetrator of the latest big news murders. Here you have Scarpetta verbally fencing with Marino in their own special brand of love/hate relationship. Here you have Scarpetta fretting and concerned about both her professional and personal relationship with FBI profiler Benton Wesley. Here you have Scarpetta playing both mother hen and fighting with niece Lucy as she struggles with her sexuality and her own professional life.
And to top it all, the book ends with Scarpetta saving the day as once again this medical examiner gets herself into the most unlikely of SWAT team action situations. As I say, don't get me wrong, the book is good. It ticks along nicely, the evidence and clues are intriguing and educational and as ever the supporting characters are great, Marino especially. I'm just happy to say that the next book is set in Ireland and I'm hoping for something with slightly different angles.
|
|
|
10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
A clever story but a low point of the Scarpetta series, 8 Feb 2003
The intricate, somewhat paranoid, detective element of Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta novels is all but absent in this excursion into the mind of a pathologist. The suspense usually key to Cornwell’s ability to grab the readers attention is ruined by the knowledge of who the murderer is quite early on in the book. The forensic evidence, both insightful and cleverly crafted into the storyline is also sparse on the ground. This is not to say that COD is without its hooks- the portrayal of Lucy, Scarpetta’s confused niece, is especially sensitive this time around as is the human element of Scarpetta’s familiarity with the victims.
As one of the “middle” books in the series COD suffers from not having the simple examiner-seeks-murderer-before-too-late plotline of the earlier novels or the complex balance of personal interest and paranoid conspiracies of her latter work. The characters are not as fully developed as we see them later and yet not as “fresh” as they seem at first. For any fan of Cornwell’s work this will still be a must-read but for someone new to her should start at the beginning with Post-Mortem and watch the characters and storyline develop.
Taut, original and intelligent this is a brilliant study into the workings of the killer instinct on its own but the sheer quality of Cornwell’s other novels makes it pale in comparison
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
(74)
£4.41
(33)
£5.49
(85)
£5.49
(28)
£5.49
See all Product Description
