text: On our beloved Kay Scarpetta and the illustrious Ms. Cornwell?  Having been an avid fan of her novels from the very beginning, I simply cannot help but ask myself....is she really writing this stuff?
  Very slow in the beginning, I began to fear a repeat of the struggle that I endured to finish Blowfly.  However, this novel does begin to pick up momentum...but not until the reader is halfway through, and certainly not until this author had left me sufficiently disgusted.  The storyline finds Scarpetta summoned home to the scene of the crime...Richmond, Virginia, where her previous employer seeks her assistance in unwraveling the mysterious death of a young girl.  So Scarpetta---with Marino tagging along of course---heads back to Richmond from her new home in Florida to offer assistance; only to find that her old building is being demolished...and that the new one, under the leadership of Dr. Joel Marcus, is sloppy regarding policies and procedures.  The demoralization of her former staff by Dr. Marcus is also unnerving to Scarpetta; and clearly he resents her intrusion. So why has he asked her to come?
  Meanwhile, Lucy, as head of The Last Precinct, is once again up to her ears in nonsense.  For such a brilliant, successful young woman (as readers have always been lead to believe), why must Cornwell insist on making her so completely stupid in her literary life?  In this tale she is once again romantically linked with a narcissistic sociopath who also happens to be her employee.
  Worse than the weak storyline, and the fact that this novel is just all over the place, is the author's disturbingly sterotypical portrayal of African-Americans throughout.  Drug dealers are black, they're dead of gunshot wounds, and most ludicrous of all is in one instance Cornwell references a dead young man's "conspicuously large organ."  Are you kidding me?  The trash collectors are "big dark men" and of course in an upscale neighborhood, the "old black woman" must WORK in one of the houses.  The author's unbelievably narrow-minded, stereotypical view of other races is disturbing at best, and frankly makes one think that she may just be as stupid from a common sense perspective as Lucy.
  
  Read only if you must, but frankly there are better ways to spend your time.
  
  
  DY
  