Leírás
There can be little doubt that Cornwell is America's most stimulating and chilling writer of crime fiction. But even she will find it difficult to better The Body Farm.' The Times 'There are passages in Cornwell's novels which stop you in their tracks ... [she] deploys prose like a scalpel' Literary Review 'The pathologist of human evil' Observer
Virginia Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta (Cruel and Unusual, 1993, etc.) has given up smoking and strayed far enough from her high-pressure office to act as a consulting profiler for the FBI, but her nerves are just as frayed at Quantico, especially since her rebellious niece Lucy is a computer-whiz trainee for the Engineering Research Facility down the hall. Scarpetta's latest case is ugly even by her standards: the North Carolina sex murder of Emily Steiner, 11, whose forensics are so contradictory that Scarpetta wants to exhume her for a second autopsy. Before she can do so, North Carolina Bureau investigator Max Ferguson, returning home from Quantico, dies, apparently of autoerotic asphyxia, and his local contact winds up in the hospital with a heart attack. Scarpetta scurries to work out how and why Temple Gault, an apparent serial killer who's the leading suspect in Emily's murder, might have killed Ferguson - and what to make of her gruesome discovery in Ferguson's freezer. No sooner has she finished the grisly re-examination of Emily, than word comes from Quantico that Lucy's sneaked into an unauthorized area after hours and is getting washed out of the program. Scarpetta's two nightmares come together with a crash - a car crash that sends Lucy to the hospital and Scarpetta out to the field to run forensics on her own automobile. As always, tension is ratcheted up, rather unconvincingly, by plots whose interconnection is never quite clear and by the constant friction between Scarpetta and her niece her sister her FBI lover, Benton Wesley her boorish buddy, Capt. Pete Marino and Emily's mother, with whom Marino is having an affair. But beneath the welter of quarrels and coincidences is as insidious a study of evil as Cornwell has turned in. (Kirkus Reviews) --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
Black Mountain álmos kisváros, ahol a rendőrségnek évente ha egy gyilkossági ügye akad, és ahol az embereknek nemigen jut eszébe éjszakánként kulcsra zárni az ajtót. Egy tizenegy éves kislány borzalmasan összekaszabolt és megcsonkított holttestének fölfedezése után azonban minden megváltozik. Dr. Kay Scarpetta igazságügyi orvos szakértő, aki néhány évvel korábban földerített egy hasonló gyilkosságot, abban a hitben érkezik a helyszínre, hogy ismeri az elkövető kilétét. Az ügy azonban jóval bonyolultabb, mint amilyennek tűnik, s hamarosan nyugtalanító események sora veszi kezdetét. Akadnak gyanúsítottak szép számmal, ám nincs válasz a nagy rejtélyre: mi okozta Emily halálát? S nem Scarpetta doktornő az egyetlen, aki megjárja a poklok poklát, mire fény derül a hátborzongató igazságra...
Szerző - Patricia Cornwell