Cruel & Unusual

Rating:
Summary: Plenty of Twists and Turns
Review: First off, let me say that although all of Cornwell's thrillers stand alone, it's better if you read them in the order they were written. More so in PC's case than in other authors who continue with the same character, book after book. This is because PC does the impossible, she keeps her characters continually growing with each story. Pass one up and you miss some of their development and the very interesting, but very flawed people that walk through the pages of her books are like people we know, friends, and one should stay current with one's friends.

"Cruel and Unusual" opens with Kay waiting for the execution of murder/rapist Ronnie Joe Waddell, but even as she's waiting someone is being killed, the killer using Waddell's M.O. One of his finger prints even shows up at one of the crime scenes.

This book has the usual Cornwellian twists and turns and as usual I was glued to my seat as I read this five star novel. I loved every second of it, because nobody does Cornwell, like Cornwell.

Review submitted by Captain Katie Osborne

Rating:
Summary: Great page turner
Review: I really liked this book. It is a page turner for sure. I would read before I went to bed and have to force myself to find a stopping point. If the ending was written differently I would have given it 5 stars, but it was still fun to read.

Rating:
Summary: Good mystery
Review: If your looking for a suspensful thriller you'll find it with Cruel and Unusual by Patricia Cornwell. In it the main charicter, Dr. Kay Scarpetta a medical examiner, finds herself traped in a web of murders. Her investigations of them lead her back to a conspiracy which is being covered up in her own legal department. I found the book to be disturbing as well as compeling at the same time. The first of it was a little crowded and hard to follow but it improved as it went on. It was more then I expected it to be. The more I read, the more involved I became and I couldn't put it down. One of the best mystery books I've read.

Rating:
Summary: A Mystery Worth Investigating
Review: Kay Scarpetta is Chief Medical Examiner for the Commonwealth of Virginia. As such she has the nasty job of processing the remains of murderer Ronnie Waddell, electrocuted after ten years of incarceration. The next day she has another body on her hands, a young man, Eddie Heath, dumped in the street strangely mutiliated. The modus operandi of Heath's murder has some suggestive echoes of the killing for which Waddell is executed. And the plot thickens further when a middle-aged fortune-teller turns up dead in her car and a fingerprint found on her furniture is identified as one of Waddell's. Meanwhile all is not well is Dr Scarpetta's office. Someone has been mucking about with the files on her computer and her morgue supervisor, Susan Stevens, is acting very oddly...

This is rather good fun, extremely readable stuff. It's the first of Cornwell's books I have read and it leaves me feeling pretty well-disposed to the prospect of reading one or two more. Scarpetta is an interesting heroine, likeable but complicated and Cornwell is an excellent plotter. If you like crime fiction and haven't tried any Cornwell before, you could do a lot worse than checking this out.

Rating:
Summary: AWESOME!!
Review: Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta is involved with the autopsy of an executed man just as a young boy is killed in a grisly murder. Scarpetta realizes that the murder scene has a lot in common with the one which was created by the executed man 10 years ago. A third event is the murder of a person within Kay's own department. The husband of the murdered woman begins spreading damaging rumors about Scarpetta and a noose of circumstantial evidence is pulled around her. Soon she is trying to solve the murders for her own self-defense as well as just doing her job. During all of this, her young niece Lucy comes to stay with her and she helps with unraveling a mystery involving computer records of fingerprints. Scarpetta is also helped by her friends Pete Marino, a homicide investigator and Benton, an old friend from the FBI. This book has plenty of twists and turns and it will keep Scarpetta fans busily trying to figure out the solution.

Rating:
Summary: Another awesome novel
Review: My mother and I are just hooked on reading Patricia Cornwell, we started somewhere in the middle with one book but since have gone back to the beginning. They are the only books I am currently seeking out to read.

Rating:
Summary: Not as Gruesome as the Last One.
Review: This book opens with the execution of rapist/murderer Ronnie Joe Waddell and the following autopsy. Not long after murder victims start showing up around Richmond that look like they were committed by Waddell. How can that be? He's dead. Then his prints show up at a crime scene and to top it off, Kay's assistant in murdered and the press blames Kay.

As usual PC carries over characters from her previous novels that we've come to know. Any second we expect cop buddy Pete Marino to drop dead from his excesses and niece Lucy is still annoying (to me anyway). Thankfully, the descriptions of the murders and the autopsies don't seem as gruesome as the last one ("All that Remains) and like the last one, this thriller gets five stars, because I just couldn't put it down.

Reviewed by Vesta Irene

Rating:
Summary: A good mystery
Review: This is a darn good mystery read that certainly keeps you up at night turning the pages. Isn't that what we all want here? More enjoyable Kay Scarpetta for fans of this series. Well worth staying up late to read!

Rating:
Summary: Interesting book to read during the holidays!
Review: This is only the second of the author's "Kay Scarpetta" novels that I've read, and I wasn't all that impressed with _Postmortem,_ so I approached this fourth book in the series with some scepticism, even though It seems to be one of the best reviewed. After a decade of appeals, Ronnie Joe Waddell is finally being executed and Scarpetta waits to perform the autopsy (though I'm not clear why that should be necessary). But that same evening, a young boy is ritually murdered in a manner very reminiscent of Waddell's style. That's followed by another murder -- and Waddell's fingerprints apparently are found on the scene. Was someone else executed in his place? The authorities involved, of course, don't even want to *think* about such an appalling possibility. More murders follow, including Scarpetta's own Morgue Attendant, and suddenly links seem to be turning up to tie the Chief Medical Examiner to the killings, as well as to corruption in her own office. All the action takes place in the few weeks preceding and following the Christmas-New Year's holidays, and the gray, cold winter adds greatly to the flavor of the narration.

There's no question that this one is an improvement over the first one I read. Cornwell doesn't bring in a completely new character in the last chapter to be the villain, for one thing. And she has added considerable depth to the personalities of all the repeating characters, especially Lt. Pete Marino of Richmond Homicide and FBI Special Agent Benton Wesley. My favorite, though, is Lucy, Scarpetta's niece from Miami, who possesses what another character calls a "frightening intellect." But she's still seventeen years old, and her home life is, in many ways, not a happy one. Aunt Kay really does try to be the friend and confident to Lucy that she would like to be, but she has her own emotional problems -- not least among them the death of her lover in an IRA bombing in London less than a year before -- and her naturally reserved and somewhat stony personality is sometimes her own worst liability.

There are problems, though. Cornwell has a rather pompous style, especially when she's describing the latest crime-fighting technological advances, or the ins and outs of UNIX. It's as if she enjoys saying "I know more about this than you do." She also indulges in irritating word-choices, such as not knowing the difference between "in" and "inside" (e.g., "I put my revolver inside my purse"), and she seems to be unaware of the use of contractions in ordinary speech. Still, the well thought out plot and the complications in possible motives and interpretations kept me reading. Many fans and reviewers take it as a given that Cornwell is the "best" mystery writer working, which I can't agree with at all. But she's not bad.

Rating:
Summary: One bad egg is forgiveable
Review: This is the worst of the Scarpetta series. which is quite an achievement seeing as all the others are brilliant. My favourites being the claustrophobic "The Body Farm", and the superbly dark "Point of Origin". I have loved all the Scarpetta's, and read them at least twice over, and i still think this is the worst.

The plot was very complicated, and it all seemed a bit of a mess. The characters were nothing special, and i this is the only book in which Cornwell manage to bore me with her normally insightful computer terminology. It's too long, and basically i dont think it has any substance. There is a great potential. The idea for the plot is superb, and could well have been one of the best, but somewhere along the line it all slips. I cant put my finger on it, but i just didnt come away from this with the satisfaction i normally get out of a Kay Scarpetta book.

Nevertheless this is still a necessary book to read if you intend to read the entire series. It is one of the major turning points. The first book to feature Temple Gault, who would later lead to Carrie Grethen, Newton Joyce, and all the other catastrophic events which culminate in the next turning point of "The Last Precint". each one has signalled a new era for Patricia Cornwell, and each one has not been quite as good as the others. But The Last Precint was still much better than this. It is, admittedly, very clever, but far too complicated, and im surprised it got the CWA's gold dagger.

nevertheless, i have given it two stars purely because it is such a major point in Scarpetta's life. You must read it if you intend to read the entire series, but dont expect to enjoy it as much as you do the others.