Rating: 
Summary: What the _ _ _ _ did I just read!
Review: I finished "Blow Fly" last night and was really disappointed. The first 80% of the book did nothing but dredge up old characters and plots. There was very little if any forensic work which is the reason I read Cornwell. The ending felt like I fell over a cliff. When I read the last page, I wondered "What the (blank) did I just read?". Patricia Cornwell will now join James Patterson as two authors I will not subject myself to until they clean up their acts! If you like a good forensic read, check out Kathy Reichs.
Rating:
Summary: Sloppy at best
Review: I hope Cornwell reads some of these reviews and will try to improve for her next Scarpetta book. Next time I hope she won't rush through the writing and will try to give us a novel up to par with "The Body Farm" or "Postmortem." As a Scarpetta fan, I can not even describe how disappointed I am at how far Cornwell has fallen. She needs to get back to the basics that made her early works a triumph.
I never liked the werewolf storyline, but being from Baton Rouge, I decided to read this one in spite of that angle to see how our homegrown serial killer inspired Ms. Cornwell. The answer: Not very much. She tells us that the Baton Rouge police and the task force are incompetent instead of showing us. So the coroner doesn't trust them -- why? Characters complain about the poor communication, whereas the "old" Cornwell would have demonstrated this through dialog. She spends so much time in the head of the werewolf character that she never fleshes out actual plot lines.Other lapses indicate just plain sloppiness on her part. Why is Scarpetta sick of still being in her black suit when three pages before she spent the night in the coroner's guest house, with her suitcase? Would she really not have changed her clothes?
On top of that, Cornwell creates all these characters just to have them killed off "off stage" in a hurried attempt to wrap up most of the storylines in the last few pages ("You don't have to worry about any of them anymore, Kay. They're all dead.") Please. No deadline is worth publishing this crap. It's an insult to her readers.
Rating:
Summary: I Should've Known Better
Review: This isn't the first time one of Cornwell's novels left me feeling as if she she had better things to do than to finish writing her book. Blow Fly has such a compelling title, I thought I'd give her another try. It was waste of time and money. Those wishing to read a well-written series featuring a female forensic anthropogist/consultant would be well-advised to check out Kathleen J. Reichs's Temperance Brennan series. In my opinion, Reichs's novels are everything Cornwell's are not.
Rating: 
Summary: Not Cornwell's Best But a Good Read
Review: Blow Fly is not Patricia Cornwell's best, but this book is a good read anyways. However, I was wanting a summary of her last Kay Scarpetta book-when Benton died, what the relationships were between people, and most importantly why Scarpetta left the coroner's office. It's been several years since the last book and I just didn't remember all the facts.
Rating:
Summary: What happened to the ending?
Review: I wholeheartedly agree with the previous posters. In fact, one review sums up my feelings exactly - "When it finally did get going, toward the end, I kept looking at the number of pages left, wondering how it was possible that I was almost finished when there was obviously so much story unresolved." I thought for sure there was a 'To be continued' in my near future. I was shocked when the answers were supposedly crammed into a few short pages. Did Ms. Cornwell run up against a deadline? The book definitely seemed like merely a segue to the next installment, which will hopefully be much more fulfilling.
Rating:
Summary: One star too many
Review: All the celebrity must have gone to Patricia Cornwell's head. Not much planning went into this disaster. Here is a thought: Kay Scarpetta, get over yourself! Who would even want to be around this morose woman. I didn't care for (or like) any of the characters. What scares me is that the Wolfman is poised for yet another return. YIKES! Badly written, no ending and characters with dead personalities. Amen.
Rating:
Summary: Not up to the level of other Scarpetta novels
Review: This was the most disappointing Kay Scarpetta novel. I wish I had read the other reviews on this site before I bought the book. I probably would have bought it anyway, but maybe I would have waited until it came out in paperback. Fans will read the book to keep up with what is going on, but this is a disappointment. Much of the book is drawn out and tedious and then everything raps up in the last 10 pages. Lots of questions unanswered. Definitely just a bridge from the last book to the next one - hope the next one comes out quickly and improves upon this one.
Rating:
Summary: Blow Fly BLOWS!
Review: What happened? No, seriously, I want to know because I couldn't finish this godawful pile of dreck. On second thought, don't bother telling me, I don't care. Another reviewer suggested Ms. Cornwell fire her ghost-writer and get back to work. I second that. The characters are all wrong. The only mystery that kept me guessing was why there were still so many pages to read every time I checked. It took forever until I finally gave up. And I never give up! But save your money and time - both would be better spent on any number of good new books out there. Two that come to mind that were 1000 times more interesting and intriguing: "The DaVinci Code" by Dan Brown and "The Breathtaker" by Alice Blanchard.
Rating:
Summary: Another major disappointment...
Review: Don't wait for an ending to this book, there isn't one. It just stops...in Chapter 124 on page 465. Until that point the reader is jerked around from plot thread to plot thread, and never does have the satisfaction of seeing how they all connect. Far too much time and space is devoted to referencing times and places from past Scarpetta novels, leaving a reader who hasn't read those books first totally lost. The main character, Kay Scarpetta, once a competent, renowned and respected professional woman, has been reduced to a pathetic bundle of anxiety, now more suited to a soap opera than a serious crime novel. Worst of all, this book is written in third person, present tense; nearly all the verbs end in "s" except for a few references to past and future. This isolates the reader from the story and places him/her in the position of viewing the action from a distance, with an annoying narrator trying to describe every detail and nuance as if the viewer were both deaf and blind. It doesn't work. A good novel immerses the reader in its plot, this one locks him/her out. Isle of Dogs was a disaster, but I thought Cornwell might have learned from the feedback and turned back to her early, very effective style and strong characters. She didn't, and this one is even worse. If you must read it, get it from your local library. Don't waste your money.
Rating:
Summary: What was that????
Review: HUGE disappointment! I should have known from the moment that Patricia Cornwell started referring to the main character as "Scarpetta" that something was seriously wrong with this book. Finished it only out of morbid curiousity - could this actually get worse?
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