Few authors are as prolific as Patricia Cornwell, and very few as
successful. Her novels of Dr Kay Scarpetta, Medical Examiner for
Virginia and amateur sleuth, have sold millions of copies, and are a
fixture on the bestseller lists. Black Notice is a predictable addition, with a feisty but extremely depressed Scarpetta tracking another serial killer, and only she can do it
because the local police all work at McDonald's and her job as
pathologist requires her to play Miss Marple. The plots of these
books are ludicrous. Twice now Scarpetta has been a killer's
nemesis, for reasons which go largely unexplained. The big thrill here is
that Scarpetta's FBI boyfriend is dead, and Scarpetta has taken up smoking
again, which is about the depth at which Cornwell can write convincingly. The
dialogue is exceptionally banal, and each scene has to be overcharged with
emotion to distract from Cornwell's basic inability to write.
All through the series, Cornwell's plots have been risible, with climaxes
to make Inspector Clouseau movies seem like cinéma vérité. The
tone of the novels started off bleakly with Postmortem and has grown
increasingly pessimistic. Indeed, the Cornwell prose reads like one
of those adverts which proclaims that "by tomorrow one in four people will
have been the victim of crime," only in her case it is more like "all of
you will have been murdered by axe-wielding lunatics..." This may sound ridiculous, but the attention to crime statistics and the huge number of weeping relatives of the victims
is obsessively morbid. We know serious crime is depressing, but the
"characters" in her books are little more than grim, morbid zombies.
One area of the Scarpetta books which is impossible to fault is the
research, which is presumably why some fans think they're getting the real
thing. Cornwell may well have worked in fields associated, but that makes
her a good crime writer about as much as being in the SAS makes one a
competent thriller novelist.
There is also a good deal of gun description, for would-be sleuths out there who can't live without a custom made pistol. Unfortunately, the novels are so routine that each progressive installment is merely an update of the newest available technology. We also get Scarpetta as cook, health expert, agony aunt and so on. I was longing for a good healthy dose of excitement all the way through this book, but while there are one or two good set pieces in Cornwell's earlier novels, the author now seems to be incapable of either creating tension or intrigue.
Reviewed by Chris Wood
