From the Publisher
Praise for Patricia Cornwell and the Scarpetta series:
“Cornwell brings [compulsive murderers] to full, frightening life.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Cornwell remains the master of incorporating real-life science into pulse-pounding fiction.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Cornwell has created a character so real, so compelling, so driven that this reader has to remind herself regularly that Scarpetta is just a product of an author’s imagination.”—USA Today
“Cornwell certainly is skilled at dissecting the not always attractive innards of human nature.”—Forbes
Library Journal
The 18th installment of Cornwell's best-selling series (after The Scarpetta Factor) weaves together ghosts of Kay Scarpetta's murky military past with modern-day high-tech terrorism. Scarpetta is finishing a fellowship at Dover Air Force Base, where she spends her days dealing in dead U.S. soldiers arriving at Port Mortuary—literally a port for the dead. Meanwhile, back at the Massachusetts-based Cambridge Forensic Center (CFC), where she is the director, disaster is brewing when evidence seems to indicate that a young man may still have been alive when his body was locked up inside the CFC's cooler. As Scarpetta begins to investigate this death, she is astounded to discover wounds inflicted by a new weapon unfamiliar to her. Scarpetta and her team soon realize that a terrifying new nanotechnology is being employed for evil purposes. Cornwell breathes new life into timeworn characters and captivates readers with intensive character development and a detailed plot.Verdict Fans of the Scarpetta series will be clamoring for this fast-paced foray into the intriguing world of forensic science and technological terrorism. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/10.]—Amy M. Handley, Kent State Univ., Columbus, OH
Kirkus Reviews
Quite a homecoming for Dr. Kay Scarpetta after her six months at Dover Air Force Base—a corpse back in Cambridge that seems to have been locked away in a mortuary still alive.
The man who died a block from Scarpetta's home in Norton's Woods is surrounded by mystery. No one knows his name, how he was killed, whether he died of natural causes or who installed the tiny audio receivers in his headphones and why. The most baffling mystery, however, is why, after collapsing and dying without shedding a drop of blood, he began to bleed hours after being placed in a drawer at the Cambridge Forensic Center. The answer to this riddle, which will plunge Scarpetta up to her elbows in another memorable postmortem investigation, will connect the unknown man to two other murder victims—a star college quarterback and a 6-year-old boy—and to three recent victims of roadside Afghanistan bombs whose memory she thought she'd left behind in Dover. And the connection, some wickedly cutting-edge work in robotics and nanotechnology, gives Scarpetta the chance to interrupt her ongoing quarrels with her posse—her anti-authority niece Lucy, her ex-profiler husband Benton Wesley, her investigator Pete Marino—and show how much she knows about absolutely everything.
"While this is a work of fiction, it is not science fiction," Cornwell announces in a preliminary note. Well, maybe. Though it has little feeling for its new characters and shows the regulars wallowing in complications instead of developing them, there's less of the fulsome self-mythologizing that drove The Scarpetta Factor (2009).
