Rating: 
Summary: WORST BOOK EVER!
Review: As a fan of Patricia Cornwell I looked forward to this book. My disappointment was complete and I am sorry I persevered until the end of the book, hoping that it will get anywhere. She is definitely off my list of future readings. It is a shame that she didn't stick to the style she knows best. It was TERRIBLE!!!
Rating: 
Summary: This is my first Patricia Cornwell Book
Review: I listen to everything on tape or CD. And I really like this book!!! It's funny. So what if the character Cornwell is most well known for isn't predominant in the story. A little variety isn't a bad thing. I don't have a problem with talking trout, crabs or small horses in the dining room in the Governor's mansion. I liked it enough to come to this forum to see what else she has written. I enjoyed it and recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: A Waste of Trees
Review: I have always been an ardent fan of Patricia Cornwell's, but this book will now make me think twice before I spend my hard-earned money on any more of her novels. I finished it, true, but this was no small feat! "Isle of Dogs" looks like something Cornwell was forced to throw together to make a publisher's deadline. If she had been an unknown writer no editor in the world would have looked twice at this colossal waste of paper, time and energy! Do yourself a favor and know that "Isle of Dogs" is going to the dogs - no Kay Scarpetta here, and unless she returns and Cornwell stops banging out a book for a buck I'll go back to skipping the Patricia Cornwell section - for good.
Rating: 
Summary: Not my cup of tea
Review: I found this book to be very disappointing. I love the Scarpetta books, and Kay does make a brief appearance in this one, but it is a totally different type of story. I found the characters annoying and boring. I didn't care what happened to them; I just wanted it to happen soon and for the story to end. I forced myself to read the whole thing, but it was a chore. Bring back Kay!
Rating: 
Summary: What you have to do
Review: is forget you are reading a Patricia Cornwell novel. If you can put that fact completely out of your head, get over your frustration, and open your mind, this becomes a fairly enjoyable, if silly, farce.Granted, Cornwell isn't a comedy writer. Ann B. Ross and T.R. Pearson do a much, much better job at combining mystery and humor, but I found enough humor in Isle of Dogs to find myself laughing once I realized I would probably never be meeting Judy Hammer and Andy Brazil again. In Final Precinct, I believe we were saying goodbye to Kay Scarpetta, and here I think we are laughing Andy and Judy out of our minds. Overall, the caliber of Cornwell's novels has been degenerating. In retrospect, she at least needed a new editor long ago. Spring Hill is in Tennessee, not Kentucky. Any atlas can tell you that. Also, the life of Lucy was becoming more trying novel by novel. Asking us to believe that the FBI would accept a former alcoholic with open arms was a stretch, but then letting us watch that alcoholic openly drink (with no reference to her problem) in later novels stretched our credibility even further and was certainly compounded by Lucy's continued self-destructive nature in general. I believe her readers could remember far more about her characters and their past lives than Cornwell could. That was becoming an irritation to me. A writer owes it to the fans to be 'true' to the characters they create and in whom the fans invest. Thomas Harris surely found that out with 'Clarice Starling' in Hannibal. Cornwell's reluctance to maintain the integrity and personality of her beloved characters in the Kay Scarpetta series; along with her destruction of Hammer and Brazil in Isle of Dogs, tells me that she is tired of both series and would rather pursue 'Jack the Ripper'. Having seen Ms. Cornwell interviewed on that subject recently, I question whether her own personality isn't slipping just a little. In any event, at least with Isle of Dogs she let her characters off the hook (no pun intended) with humor and left us laughing at something meant to be funny; as opposed to the self-destruction of a fairly good author. Just go with the flow, enjoy the laughs, and forget what you were expecting when you picked up the book and you can smile and even chuckle a few time while you say bye-bye.
Rating:
Summary: Waste Of Money
Review: In the past I have been a big fan of Patricia Cornwell. This book is a cure for any addiction. It has convinced me the next time I spend money on a book by Patricia Cornwell I'll be buying it from a garage sale!! It was so boring I didn't even finish it. I loaned it to another avid Cornwell reader and she said the same thing. Couldn't finish it. Save your money and don't purchase.
Rating:
Summary: I DIDN'T GET IT!
Review: I struggled through this book hoping to find that one shred of information that would tie it all together. I initially thought the book would take me down a path of crime and forensics, then the path split into bizarre, tongue-in-cheek events and personalities. Characters were introduced, mildly developed, then dropped without ever helping to develop the plot. Basically, I was very disappointed and I won't be so quick to pick up the next Patricia Cornwell novel.
Rating:
Summary: Save The Trees.
Review: Let's get one thing straight: I truly like and admire Cornwell's Scarpetta series. Her characters are complex, the plots are complex, and the enjoyment is simple. Any flaws I come across in my own fields of expertise were always trivial and forgivable.
One day I made the mistake of picking up a book called Hornet's Nest. It was simply... awful. It seemed to be a fantasy a lonely girl had written in high school and decided to publish: A toy-boy cop wannabee, a middle-aged police chief, and a host of weak, bumbling males that resemble the Three Stooges on hormone treatment. Oh, yes, a wishy-washy husband who shoots himself in the buttocks and dies of blood poisoning. Eck, the Dr.Seuss school of character development. Oh well, I thought, give it a well deserved burial and that won't trouble us again.
Unfortunately, it has come back from the autopsy table in a book called Isle of Dogs. I admit this one isn't high schoolish... maybe college sophomoric. Either that, or Cornwell sips too many of those Scotch's she writes about. It must have seemed funnier though amber glasses. Maybe she'd been getting too bogged down in the excessive introspective angst of her recent Scarpetta novels.
Sure, the book bears many of the same hallmarks of other Cornwell novels: death and dismemberment, law enforcement, a setting in Virginia, characters at odds with each other, and the usual quota of lesbians. There, all similarity ends in comparison to her Scarpetta novels... which are unfortunately insulted by having the Isle of Dogs bozos interact with Scarpetta and her team. Frankly, if any other author had written IoD, I'd have urged Cornwell to sue them for defamation.
What's so terribly wrong? After all, doesn't it combine an aging woman's fantasy of a hard-hitting professional woman (Hammer), her toy-boy copper (Brazil), and another cast of weak and incompetent males Hammer can show up? What can be so wrong?
First, we have talking animals: dogs, fish, crabs, and a miniature horse. The talking fish... I need one of Cornwell's Scotch's just to contemplate them. Worse, the dog in question happens to be one of ugly those bug-eyed things that creepy dowagers kiss and cuddle in their lap robes. This one is particularly annoying because it reads and types at a computer. It's being held hostage under the threat of death, and halfway through the book I wanted to put it... and me... out of our misery.
Another problem is Cornwell's poor understanding of men. Her toy-boy, Andy Brazil, muses about how much he loves the bug-eyed mutt and moons over his favorite picture... the dog cross-dressed in a Little Red Riding Hood coat. What male do you know like that? What male would you WANT to know like that?
Contrast that with Cornwell's marvelous Pete Marino character in her Scarpetta series. He's three dimensional, flawed but essentially good, and I always look forward to how he deals with the world... and the world deals with him. The only character development I looked forward to in the Isle of Dog characters was dispensing with them.
Cornwell lays in a bit of political correctness about 'Native Americans', which as part American Indian I found annoying. At the same time, she exhibits a certain smugness and elitism about the poor, ignorant folk on the Dog island itself.
Still don't see a problem? How about a history lesson of coastal pirates couched in a science fantasy/fiction scenario? Like gee, we're not smart enough to understand buccaneers unless we make them Star Wars characters.
And finally, if your stomach hasn't revolted, how about endless doses of scatological and fart jokes. We're treated to noises in a restroom stall, messes both human and horsey, and ho-ho's about someone confusing 'shît' and 'shoot' in his speech. Please, let's return to blood and guts on the autopsy table.
Oh, I forgot plain bad verbiage. Here's just one example: "The lights and sirens (of a police car) reminded Hooter of a screaming, flashing Christmas tree." I was screaming myself by the time I got to that point.
It finally dawned on me that Cornwell was attempting to write a farce. Contrast that to Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series. I sometimes laugh out loud. She gets it... she knows how to write humor. I realized that nearly all people think (a) they're a good lover and (b) they have a great sense of humor. Yet we all know people who fall far short in one or the other... or both.
So please, Patricia, focus your energy on your great forensic novels and ditch the Brazil/Hammer farce series. You'll save countless trees and fans.
Rating:
Summary: Just awful
Review: This isn't an awful book because it isn't Cornwell's usual stuff. It's just an uninteresting story, with lousy characters--don't bother.
Rating:
Summary: Huh?
Review: Let me start off by saying that I'm not a big Patricia Cornwell fan. I've read a few of the Kay Scarpetta novels and while they weren't exactly high art, they were at least entertaining. Then I started to read all the negative reviews of this book. I wondered for myself if it really *that bad*. So I went out and bought the book. And I'm sorry I did. Now, I really can't blame Ms. Cornwell for wanting to write something different. She's not the first and will not be the be the last. But there is a fine line between writing something different and then writing something different and shoving it down the readers throat. Hey Patricia, one of the rules of writing is *show*, don't *tell*. We get it already, you don't have to pound it into our skulls with every paragraph!! One of the blurbs compares this to Carl Hiaasen. I suppose Hiaasen might write something like this if he was drunk and had no talent. Maybe Hiaasen did write something like this, but was smart enough to not have it published. There are about a gazillion plots that go absolutely nowhere. I still don't understand what the Trooper Truth essays are supposed to be about or why the hell they cause such an uproar. Then we have characters with names like Trish Thrash, Unique First, Fonny Boy, and Possum. Carl Hiaasens novel may be a little on the outrageous side, but Hiaasen knows where to draw the line. Cornwell took a flying leap over it, and the results are nothing short of disasterous. Ms. Cornwell, take a few steps back and look long and hard at what you are doing. If you keep turning out junk like this, no one will buy your books anymore. I know I'm not going to.
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