Book Summary and Reviews of Port Mortuary by Patricia Cornwell

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Cathy

Tedious and Disappointing
Sorry Ms Cornwell, all your books I have read move along at a nice pace and are intriguing with the developing plot. I couldn't wait to finish this book. It was tedious and lacked Scarpetta's confidence. I felt like this is the beginning of the end for Kay (maybe it is?) To be fair I love your writing but this plot is so boring and there is nothing really 'sparking' between Benton and Kay.

Sara

Difficult
Too many technical words, plot disappointment.

Cloggie Downunder

disappointing
Port Mortuary is the 18th book in the Kay Scarpetta series by Patricia Cornwell. As the chief of the new Cambridge Forensic Centre, Scarpetta has been away for 6 months at Dover Air Force Base training in CT-assisted virtual autopsy. She is rushed back to the CFC by Marino and Lucy to handle a bizarre case that could shut down her new facility, an apparent arrhythmia victim who may have been alive when he was locked in the centre’s cooler. While she has been absent, her second in command, Jack Fielding, has been behaving very strangely. Her husband, Benton, is involved in a case where a young man with Aspergers has made a patently false confession that he murdered a young boy with a nail gun. And a young footballer was shockingly tortured and dumped in the nearby harbour. It seems these events are all connected. After 6 novels narrated in the third person, Cornwell returns to first person narration by Kay Scarpetta for this book, which I found easier to read, although the constant analysis of Kay’s feelings and borderline paranoia did become tiresome. As with previous Scarpetta books, Marino is still doing and saying stupid things; Lucy is still acting willfully; Benton is still being evasive about what he tells Kay, and Jack is letting Kay down, once again. As with many James Patterson books, the text of the first chapters is littered with brand names, something that might have the reader wondering if Cornwell profits materially or financially from this. What was interesting information: the concept of CT scanning autopsy; blade wounds; MRI scanning and metals; posthumous sperm harvesting; nanotechnology applications for surveillance and drug delivery; GSR testing for different types of bullets; robotic vehicles and flybots. The plot was original and thought-provoking so it is a pity Cornwell chose to pad the text with technical details of things like helicopter flight procedures and CT scans, which might only be of interest to technophiles, as well as trivial minutiae of driving a car and walking on icy surfaces. Some of the information was delivered by one character to another lecture-style; some of the dialogue between Benton and Kay was so wooden, they could have been casual acquaintances instead of husband and wife. The story was very slow-moving and the book would have been much improved by having the padding edited out.

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