The Trial of 'All That Remains' by Patricia Cornwell (Kay Scarpetta #3)

*This review will contain spoilers*

This is my first time reading the third installment in the Kay Scarpetta series, so this review is not clouded with any prior judgments as my previous two reviews may have been.
The novel starts with the phone ringing at Kay Scarpetta's house on a beautiful August morning. It's Detective Marino, calling to inform her that a fifth couple have gone missing, expected dead. Over the past two and a half years, four couples have gone missing and have been found dead months later - discovered by hunters in the woods, when their bodies have already partially skeletonised and almost completely decomposed. Due to this, Kay has had to write off the cause of death as inconclusive on all eight of the bodies, so with this fifth couple she goes in all guns blazing. However, it's not as simple as that, because Deborah - the missing female - is the daughter of Pat Harvey, the National Drug Policy Director and one of the most powerful women in the United States.
Due to Pat's high position and personal interest, she interferes in the case regularly, putting Kay in a terrible position by begging her for more information about her daughter's death. Kay hides away from all press, ignoring everyone's phone calls, while Pat gets more riled up about feeling stonewalled. After her daughter's body is discovered and no one will inform her of the cause of death, she makes a damning press conference announcement - she believes the serial killer is a member of the CIA, and the CIA and the FBI have taken it upon themselves to cover up the crimes and protect their own.
As time goes on and the case looks less and less likely to be solved, Kay gets suspicious of everyone around her: well, apart from Marino. Benton Wesley has been ignoring her calls and withholding evidence from her - such as the discovery of playing cards at each of the crime scenes, leading to the belief that the killings are military related - so she appears at his house to sit him down and get information about him, awkwardly turning up at the same time as he's receiving a visit from her ex, Mark James.
Meanwhile, Kay discovers a cold case from eight years ago - the double-murder of two students, Elizabeth and Jill. The murders are near identical: the shoes and socks are missing from the victims, while their cars were discovered abandoned miles away from their bodies. There were no playing cards at the scene of the crime, but the injuries were all mostly flesh wounds, meaning that the cause of death could also match. But how does a one off murder from eight years ago link with a series of murders still occurring now?
Furthermore, on top of all that's already going on, Abby Turnball, the spunky reporter from 'Postmortem', gets back in touch, as she's writing an article series about the killings and needs to interview some people in Richmond, so it's a great excuse to see her old friend Kay. Abby believes the FBI have been following her - getting a tail on her, tapping her phone lines and hacking in to her computer - to discover what information she may have unearthed about the crimes. Due to Abby's paranoia and increasingly erratic behaviour, she has been fired from her elusive position as police reporter at The New York Times, causing her to move in with Kay temporarily while she attempts to get her life back on track.
One night, after Abby and Kay go out for a meal together, they get asked for directions by a suspicious man in a dark car, and partly due to Abby's paranoia they write down the license plate number. Things don't add up - the plates are for a dark brown car, but the car that they were approached by was most definitely charcoal grey. After tracking down the owner of the dark brown car, it's revealed that the plates were switched, making the grey cars behaviour even more confusing. Kay is determined to find the car again and, after retracing their steps for the best part of a day, they find the car and the driver - a Steven Spurrier. Spurrier has a clean record: he was discharged from the navy after four months due to the death of his father, and has owned a little bookshop ever since. There's no reason to suspect that he would be the killer, but due to his unusual nighttime behaviour and the fact that two of his victims could have been patrons of his store, things escalate rather quickly over the last fifty pages of the novel, culminating in two deaths and a near fatal gunshot wound.

Evidence:
In the previous two Kay Scarpetta novels, I've had two major complaints: 1) that we don't get to interact with the killers and 2) the killers always end up dead. Thankfully, 'All That Remains' veers away from the first rule, even if the second rule is still holding fast at this point in time. Because Kay and Abby stumble across Spurrier (which is a tad contrived, but believable enough if the guy has been cruising round looking for couples for nearly a decade) we get to experience the frustration of the team as they attempt to find evidence that he's the killer and are left disappointed again and again because of how careful the guy is. Yes, it was irritating that they couldn't find anything to link him solidly to all of the couples being murdered, but it felt more realistic because of that - you hear all the time about police having a main suspect but being able to pin the crime to them successfully.
Because of this, I thought the last fifty to one hundred pages were absolutely flawless. There wasn't too much going on, the investigation was focused and it was narrowed down completely.
The same cannot be said for the rest of the story though. Because Kay has no idea on the cause of death, it's up in the air for a long time - could it be strangulation? Stabbing? Or could all of the couples be drug addicts, meeting up with dealers for their next fix and taking a bad batch? There's too many possibilities, too many different scenarios discussed, and it feels as though we're being drowned in a thousand plot choices as though this was a choose your own adventure. I understand that cases often get like this: there will be a favourite suspicion or theory, but there will also be the less likely ones that still merit discussion. That's okay in real life, but in a novel it just feels like a bit too much.
There were some things that I appreciated. Bringing in intuit/psychic Hilda Ozimek brought an extremely different element to the novel, and the fact that they didn't have her giving solid answers about the cases meant that it didn't feel like a get out of jail free card from Patricia. She knew where her story was going, so had the sense of mind to allude to it rather than giving any solid answers - this scene really kept the audience on its toes, and I wish it could have been longer.
I loved the reappearance of Abby! She's one of the more exciting minor characters, and her friendship with Kay (exemplified beautifully in their detective moments) is heart-warming and inspiring, making me want to meet up with friends and make the most of life. Towards the end of the novel she definitely starts to focus too much on her career, as she gets withdrawn from life and makes really stupid decisions, which disappoints me. I wasn't shocked by her death, because I think any character that gets close to Kay is going to be in danger, but I was surprised by the fact that she willingly visited a suspected murderer's house alone - she's been a reporter for the majority of her life and should have known that it wasn't worth the risk.
The reappearance of Mark was also nice, but it was bittersweet that they had separated in the time that passed between 'Body of Evidence' and this installment. Kay and Mark still obviously love each other, but because of how busy Kay was with this case the relationship wasn't explored as much as it potentially could have been. This is a brilliant thing: instead of trying to make every book have a strong romance storyline in it, the fact that Mark popped in and popped out again was reminiscent to real life, because people do have a lot more important things going on than worrying about fixing a romance. I wouldn't mind if he reappeared in more of the future novels, because I think the dynamic between them is brilliantly written and not at all irritating (as it can be with some, if not most, couples in crime novels).
The development of Marino's character? Flawless! Getting him to open up about the demise of his thirty year marriage - to a plump, yet seemingly pleasant, woman called Doris - was touching, as we haven't seen any of his personal life in any part of the start of the series. The scene between him and Kay, in which Kay is attempting to lecture him to get his life back on track, is extremely easy to relate to - we all have friends that we want to tell to pull themselves together, and it's a testament to how strong their personal relationship is that Marino puts up with her completely tearing him apart. It'll be interesting to see whether Marino and Doris restore their relationship in future novels, or whether we'll get to see Marino attempting to play the dating game for the first time in three decades.

Verdict:

I think one of the reasons I enjoyed this novel so much was because it was a first read. If I re-read it, I might feel as though I can get to terms with the plot and appreciate it more fully, but I won't be learning about the characters for the first time so I think the charm would be lost on me. 

Most of the positive aspects of this novel were definitely character based. Because the plot was so busy, it was nice to spend time getting to know the characters and seeing them interact with each other, because it was a relief from the constant bombardment of information, misinformation and potential leads. I enjoy cerebral leads, but when there's so much happening all at once that I feel I need to put the book down to get to grips with the events - well, that's just too in your face for me.

It's still annoying that the murderers keep getting murdered before we can see them questioned and get their motives, but hopefully that will change over the next few installments. I took a lot more time on this one because of needing to get my head around all of the constant goings on, so I'm hoping the next book isn't going to be a serial killing across the decades journey. This felt like quite an epic novel, with the discovery of the linked cold cases and the scope of different suspects considered, but I don't think the length of the novel allowed for the effect that Patricia was going for - it would have needed to be about another hundred pages in length to feel properly developed and less crowded. 

This book would have been perfect for me if it hadn't been convoluted, so I'm hoping Patricia's writing might slim down in the following installments - if she could word things more succinctly, or explain terms straight away without needing to get the characters to prompt at explanation, it might feel as though everything was running much more smoothly. However, even with those aspects this is still the Patricia Cornwell book I've enjoyed most so far in this series, and I'm looking forward to the fourth book already.

Just a quick note to the writer of the synopsis (of my edition, at least) before I finish. Mentioning a killer 'leaving just one tantalizing clue' when he actually leaves four or five does not sell your book, it will just make an audience feel cheated when they realise it's more complicated than that. I'd say that the tantalising clues were the unbranded cigarettes, the missing shoes and socks, the playing cards, the white fibres on the car seats and, despite only being revealed in the last page, the CIA gas card. There's quite a lot of clues in this novel that confuse the investigators and the press - it'll perplex the audience if they think they're only meant to be tantalised by one of them. 

The Trial of 'Body of Evidence' by Patricia Cornwell (Kay Scarpetta #2)

*This review will contain spoilers* 

The second Kay Scarpetta novel starts off in a wildly different manner than 'Postmortem', the debut novel in the series. Beginning with a prologue, we read two letters written by a Beryl Madison and addressed to a mysterious 'M'. Beryl discusses her fear of someone coming into her room while she is asleep and the fact that she doesn't want to return to Richmond, painting an image of a woman scared out of her skin.
When the main bulk of the story starts, it's evident why Beryl was so scared: on the night that she returned to Richmond, she was brutally slain at her home. Bloodstains mark the walls and floor throughout her home, as she had attempted to escape from the knife-wielding killer. However, Beryl had a state of the art burglar alarm system that she had reset after inviting her murderer into her home, so questions abound as to why she would have let him into her house when she was so terrified of this exact possibility.
Beryl Madison was an author and, as a young girl,was mentored by Pulitzer Prize winner Cary Harper. As details emerge that Beryl's most recent project was an autobiography, questions circulate as to whether Cary could be her murderer - did things happen in her youth that it's in his best interest to cover up? This situation is made even more likely when it's revealed that Cary had a contract with Beryl forcing her into silence, which she has broken by deciding to write her memoir. However, when Cary also turns up dead - his head bashed in after returning from a night out at his local pub - everything goes up into the air once more. Following Cary's death, Sterling Harper - his sister - commits suicide, but it takes them a while to learn how (due to the similarities between dextromethorphan and levomethorphan), and her suicide is followed by the suicide of Al Hunt, a car wash attendant who met Beryl a couple of times while she was alive. Al was a psychiatric patient, so there's a question as to whether he could have been the killer, but when his alibi is solid things take another confusing turn. Before his suicide, Al discusses an old friend - Frankie - with Kay, telling her some rather gruesome stories, and this gets Kay thinking there could be more to this connection than meets the eye.
With Beryl's agent putting pressure on Kay to find the missing manuscript or risk getting sued, Kay takes leave from her office and starts attempting to investigate and question people who could be involved. Knowing that Al was a psychiatric patient, she starts off at Valhalla - the hospital where he was interred - and after discovering there was a fellow patient called Frank, Kay puts two and two together and solves the murder pretty easily. Frankie was a paranoid schizophrenic whose mother turned up dead a couple of years ago, and while they can't find him or a connection between him and Beryl it's pretty much accepted that he was her murderer.
Frankie doesn't appear directly until the last few pages of the novel (again, in a similar way to 'Postmortem') and he doesn't last very long after he appears, being shot to pieces by Kay in her entry hall. Frankie worked as a bag attendant at the local airport, which is where he first interacted with Beryl Madison. After becoming obsessed with her, he stole her bag off of the baggage claim, then took it to her home later that night - this being the reason that she trusted him enough to let him into her home. Frankie steals Beryl's manuscript after brutally murdering her, then proceeds to kill the people closest to her (namely Cary Harper, who it is revealed molested Beryl consistently throughout her teenage years). After fixating on Kay, who develops a strong bond with Beryl following her murder, Frankie pulls the same stunt on her - stealing her bag from the baggage claim - but because she works out what is going on (after letting him into her house) she takes him out without many problems.

Evidence: 
I really hope the synopsis I've written above makes some sense, because for the majority of this novel I was just wandering around in a dazed and confused state. It seems pretty obvious that Cary Harper is Beryl's murderer - then he turns up dead. So it must have been her agent! But there's nothing to say that he would have been in Richmond at the time of her death, and if he'd murdered her he wouldn't be making such a fuss about finding her manuscript. So it must be Al Hunt, the car wash attendee - the killer leaves lots of car carpet fibres on her body, and he would have been covered in them! ...But no, it's not him, because he was out with his parents when both murders occurred. So it must be Frankie, his old friend from the psychiatric hospital, who just happened to have both dealt with Beryl Madison's bags at the luggage claim and bumped into her at his old friend's car wash. Yeah, that makes some sense.
I don't know if I'm getting cranky about the Kay Scarpetta novels because the killers are being pulled out of thin air, but I wasn't too happy about how this one played out either. In 'Postmortem', the killer randomly appears at the end after not being mentioned at all throughout the novel, and while Frankie got some mentions it still didn't feel like a proper murder mystery. For example, they make a big deal about Frankie having a stutter, but Beryl Madison never mentioned this while reporting his threatening phone calls. Similarly, when Kay first receives a phone call from him, she doesn't mention his stutter either, but after they're told that he has one all of his speech is wr-wri-written l-li-like th-this. It feels convoluted and badly crafted: if someone has a stutter while nervous or under stress, make it a consistent character trait rather than something that pops up too late in the book to make any sense.
Furthermore, I just think there were too many loose ends for this to be considered a great story. Yes, they were all wrapped up by the end but because they were kept dangling throughout the book it was hard to keep track of everything. Sparacino - Beryl's evil and corrupt agent - is mentioned consistently throughout the first half of the novel but then there's a hundred page section where his name doesn't crop up at all; this meant that I'd completely forgotten about him and the story felt disjointed. The same can be said about Mark James, Kay's ex-boyfriend, who she ruminated upon regularly but who didn't have that much of an effect on the plot.
Because the first novel focused so much on character development, this second installment is much more plot based - the only expansion we get on Kay's character is the introduction of Mark. He has a rather elusive back story and there's a lot of debate surrounding his character (is he a spy? An agent? A lawyer? A criminal?) and while that gets resolved by the end it takes a long time and it makes it very difficult to care - he just feels like a poor excuse to write in a romantic interest and add some more tension into the story. If Mark doesn't crop up again in future novels I'm going to feel rather cheated - the novel ends on him inviting Kay to Aspen and declaring his love for her, so it feels as though there needs to be more reference to him; if he's not seen again, it's going to mean he was a completely unnecessary inclusion.
As well as Kay not being developed much, Detective Marino's character is also left as he was in the first book, with the exception of some much more abrasively homophobic comments. None of the other characters are expanded upon because of the fact that most of them end up dead. Rose, the secretary at Kay's office, frequently drops off telephone messages, and Benton Wesley from the first novel crops up again - other than these two we have new characters being added consistently and being left undeveloped, so it makes it hard to care about the group of characters as a whole.
I will admit, I did cheer a little bit when Kay shot and killed Frankie at the end of the novel - it was good to see her actually being a badass, rather than just ruminating on the fact that she has a gun and could use it if the situation arose. However, because the killer was murdered at the end of 'Postmortem' and we've now had another one shot down, it does feel like the apprehension rate of the Richmond PD must be pretty low - it would be good to get the why they did it and how from the killers, rather than just the other characters speculating. At the moment it just feels like there's a formula Patricia Cornwell is sticking to, so I hope she shakes it up over the next installments.

Verdict: 
I can't remember much about 'Body of Evidence' from the first time I read it - in fact, I could only remember Sterling Harper's death. This meant I was rather surprised when Cary Harper was murdered: he was definitely my number one suspect. However, from the first chapter I kept thinking "it's likely that Beryl left her manuscript with someone she trusted down in Key West - someone should go and check it out". Did they? Eventually. But if Kay had just headed down to Key West earlier in the novel, all of this could have been resolved much more quickly, so it did feel rather unnecessary.
I still enjoy Patricia Cornwell's writing. The little scientific explanation of the different between dextromethorphan and levomethorphan definitely intrigued me, which is something that science doesn't normally do - you can tell that Patricia knows what she's talking about in those situations. However, I can imagine that that would get on some people's nerves - a lot of people don't want to feel as though they're taking chemistry lessons while reading a novel. Some of Kay's annoying traits from the first novel had dissipated (she complained about men a lot less, and she didn't fade out from conversations as frequently) which was a positive thing; hopefully she will continue to develop into a more likable character.
On the whole, this book ended up disappointing me. This was a re-read so, again, that could be why, but it just felt like it was a whole lot of nothing. I'm still continuing on with my Patricia Cornwell read-a-thon, but I'm just hoping that the next novel, 'All That Remains', will interest me more because I haven't read it yet - it will be the first book in this read-a-thon that I'm going into with no previous knowledge or expectations. I still feel as though we should get a least some interaction with the killer before they turn up and get shot to death, because then we can make up our minds for ourselves rather than just being told "oh yes this man is the killer". It also feels as though the killers need to stop getting as obsessed with Kay - for two in a row to be giving her freaky phone calls and appearing at her house to murder her just seems a little bit unnecessary. 

July book haul

The main section of my book haul is over on my other blog, Everything Alyce. This is purely my crime book haul.

eBooks: 

Rob was kind enough to tweet me and let me know when both of his books went on daily deal for 99p, and because I'd considered purchasing them in the past it was about time that I did that. 

Books:

I already own quite a few Ben Aaronovitch novels, but I just haven't gotten around to reading them yet. Out of these three books I'm most intrigued by the premise behind 'Last Breath' - the novel has a blind protagonist who can touch a body and view the last eighteen seconds before death.

I have all of Karin Slaughter's novels so far, so when I heard it was time for the release of 'Pretty Girls' I had to get this beautiful hardcover version.

My local The Works is having a closing down sale, so I managed to buy a large batch of Ann Cleeves novels for a mere fifteen pound. I will definitely be putting a few of these on trial soon - I've been considering reading some of her novels for a while, but haven't yet gotten around to it.

So that's sixteen crime novels purchased this month. You can expect to see all of these books going on trial in The Courtroom eventually, even if it takes me a while to get around to them.