[Priestvyrce]

When I first read Ms. Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta novels, I loved them. Dr. Scarpetta and her liason Det. Marino were fun to read and the mysteries were complex and thrilling. I read her first book,Postmortem , I was hooked and bought up ALL the Patrica Cornwell paperbacks that I could and I read them. Well, reading isn't the correct word: I devoured them.

But after a while, I started disliking my heroine, Dr. Scarpetta. It wasn't til after reading From Potter's Field that Kay started to become a shrew and a home wrecker. She kept falling in love with the wrong guys or the right guys, but who she knew were not good for her and she for them. Plus, the Uber-niece, Lucy was so over the top perfect in all that she did professionally, I thought that she might be Superman in disguise.

Still, I kept on reading the series all the way to the paperback version of Point of Origin . The stories, when they reflected and stayed on the case, were still entertaining and thrilling, but the minute the POV shifted to Kay or Lucy's love life...well, it just made me groan.

And maybe this is the problem with ALL series genres, they after a while start to come apart at the seams. The characters are no longer living and breathing characters, but soon become carictures of themselves. Which is why I have stayed away from her latest Dr. Scarpetta novel,The Last Precient . Still part of me wants to get it, just for old times sake and maybe I will, but another part of me says to myself that it is time to just walk away.

What about any of youi? Have you read any of Cornwell's Dr. Scarpetta novels? And if so, what do you think of her?

[whitebelly]

I know what you mean ... I’ve read a couple of Scarpetta books and these were my sentiments exactly. Additionally, Cornwell seems to have lost all the credibility she had left with her non-fiction book on Jack the Ripper (exposing the painter Sickert as the JtR and cutting up a few of his paintings in the process :eek: )

An author who is often compared to Cornwell is Kathy Reichs. I’ve read the first three books (Dèjà Dead, Death du Jour and Deadly Decisions ... yes, the titles s*ck) in her “Temperance Brennan” series, and liked them better than Cornwell. Like Cornwell, Reichs is a forensic pathologist in real life, supplementing her (no doubt) considerable income with the proceeds from writing bestsellers on ... a forensic pathologist.

Her scientific exposés are better than Cornwell’s (that is, if you like reading 5+ pages on the different kind of incisions different kinds of cutting implements make on different kinds of bones of the human body) but in the end I tired a bit of the formula where the main character (whether it’s a FP, or a chief inspector, detective or whatever) gets mixed up in the murder investigation as an intended victim, but is of course miraculously saved in the nick of time at the end of the novel. Even the best of crime fiction suffers from this flaw. The never-enough-praised Wallander series by Henning Mankell is no exception sadly, even though Mankell is often more inventive than most.