Wednesday 2 September 2015

The Trial of 'Cruel and Unusual' by Patricia Cornwell (Kay Scarpetta #4)

*This review will contain spoilers*

Firstly, I must apologise profusely for this review being so late in its arrival - the idea of reading a Patricia Cornwell novel a week was a brilliant one, until life got in the way and I didn't have enough time to follow through on it. It's here now, though, and hopefully I'll get back on track with the fifth book in the series.

This novel starts off in a wholly different way: with the death of Ronnie Joe Waddell, a death row inmate. Kay is disturbed by this aspect of her job - needing to prepare an autopsy for someone who is still living - and she still holds out hope that the governor will call of the execution, allowing her to have a night off in her own home. Alas, the governor shows no such mercy, and Kay finds herself travelling to the morgue in the middle of the night to work on a freshly deceased man.
The same night that Ronnie Joe gets executed, a boy is found attacked - his clothes removed and piled at his feet, a gunshot wound straight through his head, and areas of his skin on the inside of his left leg and on his left shoulder removed. The two events cannot be connected, but the position of the boy's body is extremely similar to the position that Ronnie Joe left his victim in nine years before. Even stranger, a single eiderdown feather is found on the body.
Fast forward a couple of weeks, and another body is found: this one a suspected suicide victim, found in her garage with a hose pipe leading from her car exhaust into the drivers' side window. However, Jennifer Deighton's death could not have been a suicide - her lungs have no evidence of breathing in the noxious gases, because she was dead before she was placed in her car. When Ronnie Joe's fingerprint is found at her house, the case takes another surprising twist - how could the murderer be a dead man? What's even more inexplicable is the fact that Ronnie Joe's fingerprints have completely gone from their records, and he was cremated straight after his death so there's no chance to take more.
Even more people end up dead - Susan, Kay Scarpetta's mortuary assistant, found shot dead in her car, Frank Donahue, the prison warden, found in the same way. The media start turning all attention to Kay, as Susan's husband blames her for her death - this, combined with the fact that Susan had a large influx of money in her bank account soon after Kay made a large withdrawal... It all looks like it's going downhill for our heroine.
After being forced to take paid leave, Kay is determined to prove her innocence, so attempts to recreate the decade old murder scene of Robyn Naismith. Once she finds prints that prove Ronnie Joe was not the murderer, it's obvious what has really happened - someone high up has switched prints, so there's a psycho on the loose masquerading as a dead man.
Due to some well-placed hunches, they track the killer down - a Temple Brooks Gault, who had been secretly released from prison some months earlier. With the announcement on the news that there had been feathers found at the crime scenes, Temple contacted the police to announce that his eiderdown jacket had been stolen - by filing the theft report, it automatically put him out of the line of inquiry. When Kay catches on to this, she contacts Marino and they rush to Temple's apartment, but it's too late - he's already run out of the window, never to be seen again.

Evidence:
If you've been following my series of Patricia Cornwell reviews so far, you'll know I often have two complaints about her novels, but thankfully this one broke both of them. We interacted with the killer very early on - in a very minor, forgettable role, but interacted nonetheless - and at this point, with the killer on the run, there is a hell of a lot of potential for what could happen in book five (or later on in the series).
Yes, there was a lot going on in this novel. The seemingly unrelated homicides of Eddie, Jennifer, Susan and Frank were obviously going to end up linked in the end, but at the time of each of them it was almost easier to treat them as separate events - if you dwelt too much on the fact that they were going to be linked by culprit, it really did hurt your brain. Patricia Cornwell was very clever in her set up of this novel: by dropping small clues and small coincidences, it made it a lot easier to stay interested and switched on by the story.
It was also genius to finally allow us to see how death affected the chief medical examiner. As someone who interacts with the dead daily, Kay has often seemed unaffected and aloof, but with the knowledge that her lover - Mark James - died in a terrorist attack in London, her attitude changes quite drastically. Hearing from Marino and Lucy, amongst other people who love and care about her, it really does bring to life the way that grief affects people, and how we all deal with the same situations in vastly different ways. It added a very touching, human element to the novel, and I think it made it a lot easier to empathise with and care for Kay. I hated the fact that Mark was dead (I nearly shed tears on the bus!) but it had to happen to allow our protagonist to become fully fledged and developed into her own character, so it was a blessing in disguise.
The reappearance of Lucy was also brilliant - she hasn't appeared in the novels since 'Postmortem', and it was interesting to see how she had grown up. She still has extreme attachment issues due to her uncaring mother, but her brain has trebled in size and she was a welcome addition to the crime solving crew - I sincerely hope Benton Wesley follows through on his offer of employment when she graduates. Throughout most of the first novels, it's been Kay patronisingly explaining medical terms and technicalities to the rest of the ensemble, so it was brilliant to see the tables turned and to see Kay getting things dumbed down for her instead - another element that makes her feel much more human.

Verdict:
Whereas the last two novels have been strongly centered on the plot and the crime-fighting, it was good to have a more relaxed title that focused on character development. If Patricia can write the rest of the novels in the series as well as she wrote this one, I'm going to be in for a delightful time - it had the perfect mix of action and characterisation, which is something I love in a novel.
I adored the ruminating on the death penalty - it's such a controversial topic, and it was good to get some of Patricia Cornwell's thoughts on the subject conveyed to us through her character. I also loved the tackling of government corruption: I'm sure it happens much more than any of us are aware, so making Ronnie Joe's murder victim the governor's ex-girlfriend added a personal agenda to the matter that also gave us food for thought on what we would do in that situation. This was a novel that really made me think about what I would do differently, or if I agreed with what the characters decided, and I enjoyed it all the more for that.
The only reason it wasn't perfect was because it was another killer getting away, which means we've now had two unsolved cases and two solved with the deaths of the perpetrators. I might be old-fashioned, but I really do want to see someone reprimanded and brought to justice, rather than just killed or on the run. Maybe that will happen with the next installment.

Once again, my apologies for taking so long to complete the trial of 'Cruel and Unusual', but the trial of 'The Body Farm' should not be this delayed. Thank you for continuing on with me on this journey through Patricia Cornwell's bibliography and Kay Scarpetta's life. 

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