Cause Of Death

livro fraco, repetitivo

Nicely written, but I found the story running to the end a bit too fast with sometimes unsatisfactory developments. A book for Dr Scarpetta fans.

Loved it

Kay Scarpetta returns for her seventh outing, and finds herself called out on New Year’s Eve to a naval base where the body of a diver has been found deep in a harbour used as a parking lot for old naval vessels awaiting decommissioning. She has been covering for one of her regional deputies who has returned to their native Britain following the death of their mother. Because of the nature of the site, naval officers are officiating at the locus, and she finds the local police decidedly unhelpful and obstructive.It turns out that she knows the dead person, as they had been a journalist and had frequently dealt with her office. While many of her relations with the media had been difficult, with a tendency to misrepresent her and her work, this journalist had been reliable and conscientious in his reporting.The naval officers are keen to have the death signed off as an unfortunate drowning, but Dr Scarpetta is not convinced. Her autopsy reveals that he had in fact been murdered, and that cyanide had been introduced into his air supply. This revelation is not welcomed, and she finds herself subjected to personal and official attacks. As usual, she finds herself working closely with her exceptionally irritating niece Lucy, the jaded senior Homicide Detective, Pete Marino, and leading FBI profiler Benton Wesley. Readers of the previous books in this series will be aware of the complications that dealing with all of them can entail. Oh, and there is a local cult-driven commune that has been making ever more threatening pronouncements, and they seem to be involved somehow in the journalists’ death.While the storyline is fairly gripping, I think that Patricia Cornwell might well have jumped her personal shark here, taking what had been a robust, engaging and essentially plausible series and leading it into more fanciful, and deeply unbelievable waters. It was still an entertaining novel, but vastly removed from the excellent books with which the series opened.

Brought this series for my mum for her birthday, and she thoroughly enjoys them, the rest of the series will be coming soon only another 8 to go