Rating: 
Summary: Almost but not .....
Review: I was so excited to read this book, but when i did i was disapointed. I thought it had a lot of potential, but it stopped short of satisfying my Scarpetta cravings. I could care less about Benton, and thought he was out of the picture for good. I thought Dr S was headed in a new direction, and maybe the book would her over Benton and the fact she is stuck on him. More of Lucy, Marino and anyone else would have been great. Maybe Dr. S could have become a lesbian!! But i doubt that will happen now. Maybe Lucy will get her own book. I am hoping for a long detailed story line with Nic. But i am wanting more, and will always buy the books no matter how much i disagree with the story line, i think they are the best told ever. P Cornwell is the greatest writer, even if i think she is in a little slump.
Rating: 
Summary: Check your averages!
Review: You'd better check the customer review averages for this book. You give it 5 stars and the only four reviews give it 3, 2 and two 1's. Mine is the third 1. This is a poor excuse for a Kay Scarpetta novel. The third person, present tense, is a constant annoyance. The plot is contrived and unbelievable. I was hoping for better from Patricia Cornwell, but her books have usually been either very good or very bad. This one is very bad.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: The author cuts the heart out of the book by using the third person narrative; at first I kept flipping ahead to see if Kay herself would join us at some point, but alas, she did not. The cast of characters we have known for so long seems here to be played by unenthusiastic and not-very-talented stand-ins and everyone spends an inordinate amount of time feeling sorry for themselves. The return of Benton Wesley was about as believable as Bobby Ewing in the shower in the old "Dallas" soap. Towards the end of the book things began to get more interesting, but the tale was abruptly brought to a halt by the killing off of the vast majority of the people who were causing problems - voila, no more story left (or, are they REALLY dead... but at this point, who cares). Maybe Patricia Cornwell was pressured to do another Kay Scarpetta book when she really didn't feel up to it. Hopefully she will bring the good doctor back in style someday, or if not, let her retire with dignity.
Rating: 
Summary: Unusual and Disconcerting
Review: First, let me say that I consider Kay Scarpetta practically a three dimensional person. I am a Cornwell advocate! However, in the interests of honesty, I must confess that I have found this book both challenging and inconsistent. For the die-hard Cornwell fan, back up and prepare yourself!For the Unitiated Cornwell, PLEASE don't read this book first. In this book, Scarpetta relinquishes the first-person voice, so we see her traipse through baggage relating to the serial killer Jean-Baptiste Chandonne (I couldn't resist spelling that name out) and his evil brother Jay Talley (aka Jean-Paul). The third-person omnisicient shifts without warning among a variety of characters, including the bad guys and some not-wholly-unanticipated surprise characters. While necessary for plot development, this strategy might render some die-hard Scarpetta allies confused and uncomfortable. We are used to Kay, her ruminations and rationalizations... without them, this book doesn't seem quite a companion of the series. Giving Cornwell the benefit of the doubt, how else can we the reader know what Jay Talley is up to? Where he is? How else can we understand the twisted motivations that fuel his freakish brother, imprisoned on death row? There are numerous and incredibly complicated forces at work in this novel... so change is required... but the changes, somehow, fail to connect Scarpetta to her reader. In a way, it's not a book about Scarpetta so much as the circumstances at which she finds her personal and professional life at this point. Essentially, I find this book fuzzy in its logic and somewhat confusing. I don't understand how some parts of the plot fit together, and I HAVE read all of the other books -- I cannot imagine the confusion of a newcomer to this series! It's like Cornwell has fallen into the trap of melodrama... the engaging clarity and focus of Postmortem (the series springboard) has become mired in innumerable complexities, and the essential simplicity of storytelling is lost... though I dare not fear it's lost forever. I can't give away the novel's Big Surprise (although I see that many other reviewers have), but once you read the book for yourself, consider that this Big Surprise is a huge letdown. I cannot imagine that Cornwell planned ahead to blindside her audience as she did with this Big Surprise. How incredibly unfair is that, when a running theme throught the series is accepting inevitability? Dealing with loss? Anyone who read the prequel The Last Precinct will remember with poignant clarity Kay's confidences with her trusted friend and colleague Anna, confidences which did more to paint Scarpetta in human form than any of the predessor stories alone or combined... and it was all for naught? Somehow, I find this novel less believable or engaging than other Cornwell books. This admission pains me; I am one of the few fans of Scarpetta's series with Jim Brazil and Judy Hammer. In those books, at least I thought I understood her purpose and goals for writing. Alas, in this one, I felt no such comfort. With all of this being said, for the true Cornwell fan, Blow Fly is a must read.
Rating: 
Summary: Hard To Finish
Review: I thought maybe it was just me, maybe I didn't understand the book. As I read the other reviews here I can tell you- It's not JUST ME. This book was hard to finish, it wasn't as good as any of the other Kay Scarpetta novels. I am a die hard Cornwell fan, and have been waiting years along with the rest of you to get my hands on a new Scarpetta book. But what has Scarpetta come to? Everyone in this book is angry and depressed. Lucy is a killer, Marino leaves his home dejected and depressed, and Benton is back? How could Lucy and Marino hide this fact for so long? There are characters that just show up, like Rudy. What happened to Teun? And the ending, oh boy. After reading the whole book.. I won't give it away..but to have it wrapped up so quickly and easily didn't statisfy me. Hopefully the next Scarpetta book will be better!
Rating:
Summary: Sad day for Scarpetta
Review: Having loved all of the other Scarpetta books, I read Blow Fly with a sense of anticipation. Unfortunately, this wasn't met at all. The book lacks the mystery of the preceeding volumes. All of the characters seemed manipulated towards the ending, which wasn't nearly so obvious in the other books. I was disappointed with the third person perspective, although I understand while it was used. However, Cornwell calling Kay "Scarpetta" throughout the book seemed to distance her from the character. If she was calling the main character of her story by last name, she should have kept it consistent throughout. Overall, the story seemed tired and not very imaginative. Hopefully the sequel (whenever it comes out) will be better than this uninspired novel.
Rating:
Summary: hugely predictable and intensely disappointing!
Review: As a long-time Cornwell and Kay Scarpetta fan I am shocked to see the series drop to this very sad level of quality. After a disappointing "Black Notice" when the questionable wolfman Chandonne was introduced, Cornwell raised herself almost to her old level of writing in "The Last Precinct", but now she seems to completely have hit rock bottom. The story is predictable from page 1 and I had to gasp when I saw that she indeed resurrected Benton Wesley! How unbelievable yet cheesily predictable is that? And Lucy and Marino knew all along he was still alive? I don't think so! It seems to be more like: we have run out personal storyline for Kay after her last lover turned out to be serial killer, so let's resurrect the lost love of her life! None of the characters, including Kay in this book, come across as remotely sympathetic or believable: Lucy is more neurotic than ever, and after being wunderkind computer whiz, turned problematic law enforceress, turned alcoholic, turned highly problematic self-employed private investigator, she is now going around executing people herself. On the note of Lucy's European execution adventure: the European portions of this novel are extremely poorly written and make you wonder if Ms. Cornwell has ever visited Germany or Poland. At least one would assume that a writer of her notoriety can afford a foreign language editor and not let a book go to print with emberrassingly poor and wrong German phrases (I am a native German, trust me: it's bad). Marino and Wesley in this book have nothing in common with the carefully crafted, believable characters that they were in earlier novels, Marino is just alltogether pityful and disgusting, and Wesley is totally weird. Sadly they drive this book more than the Scarpetta character who in the first half of the book seems a mere cameo appearance. The book dwells so much on the past and innuendo from previous stories that the present storyline never develops any of the strenght, pace, or complicated density that were the hallmarks of the earlier Scarpetta books. The book is made up of over 100 miniature chapters, some of them barely 3 pages long, and in parts the dialogue and storyline are so poorly coherent and sketchy that you have to go back and re-read portions to stay with the action. Overall a very sad and poor effort!
Rating:
Summary: Looking Backward, Going Nowhere Fast
Review: I, too became tired of Cornwell after The Last Precinct and then was completely captivated by the Jack the Ripper story. That she could make that tale so compelling, renewed my respect for Cornwell's writing. But, Blow Fly is even more tiresome than the Last Precinct. Not only do we spend two-thirds of the book reintroducing characters from the past--but we bring back the dead. I was hoping for something fresh and compelling, but I got something warmed over one too many times.
Rating:
Summary: Pathetic...what's wrong with you, Patricia Cornwell...?!
Review: This was perhaps the worst of the Kay Scarpetta books, and I consider myself a loyal fan of Patricia Cornwell's. The characters are disjointed and the plot lurches from one improbable scenario to the next. The introduction of the character Nic(olette) Robillard is purposeless, as her development is so stunted I felt no sympathy whatsoever even though this woman is seeking justice for her mother's murder while simultaneously trying to raise a small son on her own since her husband abandoned them. While it was indeed fun to revisit the horrific brothers Chandonne and the palpably nasty Bev Kiffin, the last 10 pages of this novel are clearly a hastily, poorly thought-out, thrown-together attempt at bringing closure to the entire mess. It's so hurriedly concluded I literally felt betrayed by the time I got to the last page. I'm not bothering to read any further Scarpetta tales after this debacle.
Rating:
Summary: Couldn't even finish
Review: I was sorely disappointed. This was the first Scarpette book that I hadn't purchased sight unseen, due to my dislike of The Last Precinct. I checked this out of the library and I'm glad I didn't waste my money. The story is disjointed, jumping from place-to-place, one dislikable character to the next. I found myself reading and rereading pages of dialogue to try and understand what they were so angry or upset about. Marino is a patheticself-pitying whiner, Lucy is neurotic, and Wesley and Chandonne are just bizarre. Scarpetta, in spite of then book being "A Scarpetta Novel", is barely in the first 200 pages. I read about 300 pages and then decided I wasn't enjoying myself and wasting my time. This is the first book I've put down unfinished in years.
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