The Trial of 'The Body Farm' by Patricia Cornwell (Kay Scarpetta #5)

*This review will contain spoilers*

In the most exciting Kay Scarpetta novel so far, 'The Body Farm' kicks off in explosive fashion with the death of an eleven year old girl. What makes it worse? It appears she's a victim of Temple Brooks Gault, the serial killer who escaped at the end of 'Cruel and Unusual'.
Young Emily Steiner was abducted from her home in the middle of the night, and was found six days later beside the lake in Black Mountain, North Carolina. Black Mountain is not a town that is prepared to deal with homicides, so the fact that it could be linked to the wider work of a serial killer is absolutely horrifying to the residents. In another shocking twist, one of the investigators, Ferguson, ends up dead - seemingly through auto-erotic asphyxiation - and the officer who found him at home has an extremely serious heart attack. It's left down to the indomitable Kay Scarpetta, Pete Marino (now Captain), and profiler Benton Wesley to attempt to solve the case.
The focus starts off on Gault, obviously - the murder mirrors that of Eddie Heath, Gault's first victim, with excised flesh patches being found on the neck and inner thighs and a gunshot wound through the back of Emily's head. However, when Ferguson is found hanging, they find him wearing a pair of Emily's mother's panties and he has bagged flesh in his freezer - both rather incriminating pieces of evidence. Adding to this, it's rumoured that Emily's school janitor, Creed Lindsey, had feelings for Emily - he's a simple-minded fellow who attempted to be friends with the children by giving them sweets and becomes a suspect because he was suspected believed to be the perpetrator of a hit and run at a different school many years previously.
Meanwhile, Kay's niece, Lucy (who you will remember from previous installments in the series) is having a tough time - she's having a secret relationship with a woman and doesn't know how to tell anyone, it appears she broke into the lab at Quantico in the middle of the night so she is taken off of her internship with the FBI, and she crashes Kay's car after drinking too much at a meal. Kay doesn't want to believe Lucy did these things, despite the quickly mounting evidence against her, so she actives her super stealth investigating mode once more, and tries to get to the bottom of things. Kay is deeply suspicious of Carrie, Lucy's girlfriend, and she goes to visit her in the shop where she works - after their confrontation, Kay is certain she created a cast of Lucy's thumbprint to infiltrate the laboratory.
But despite this discovery, many things still don't add up for Kay. Once she investigates Lucy's car accident, she realises the back bumper of her Mercedes is covered in mint green paint - Carrie's car is red, so that takes her out of the equation. She meets Creek Lindsey and doesn't believe he could have harmed a fly - he's much too simple. But after learning that the Steiner's had another daughter who died from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome before they moved to the area, she decides to go further into Emily's mother's background - she believes Denesa may be lying to her.
It turns out that there was no SIDS victim; she fabricated the existence of the other child. This makes Kay suspect that Denesa may be suffering from Munchausen's syndrome - a psychological disorder when the sufferer fakes emotional or physical trauma to get attention and sympathy from those surrounding her. Kay is convinced Denesa must have killed Emily herself, and when she realises that Denesa's car was the same colour as the one that drove Lucy off the road, she realised that the mother had actually been trying to kill her to stop her from discovering her dirty little secret. Kay goes round to the house to attempt to find proof - finding it in the bathtub in the basement, which had blood around the plug hole and a quarter that had marked Emily's skin after her death. Kay and Marino have been arguing, so he has been staying at Denesa's to get some space from her and to console the grieving mother, but as soon as Denesa knows Kay has caught her she attempts to murder Marino in one final showdown. Kay gets to the room and kills Denesa with a shotgun blast, and thankfully manages to save Marino's life.

Evidence:
Compared to the previous Scarpetta novels, this one was much more low key. Instead of having three or four murders, there were just two - yes, they were both equally confusing and shocking, but it made it much more effective to just be focusing on those two throughout the novel. Linking in a previous serial killer was a brilliant choice, and I loved the fact that the story had a brilliant pace set throughout it - there was no lull to introduce the characters or the plot, because it was the most direct continuation out of the series so far.
I also adored the fact that the murderer was a woman. The first four books all had male killers, and with women also committing heinous crimes it seemed about time that the pool of perpetrators widened a little bit. Yes, the mother killing her daughter was a harrowing inclusion, but it does happen - and more frequently than you would believe, as fillicide causes over 400 deaths each year in the USA and even more than that worldwide. It made it much more realistic than most of the previous novels, which included random killers picking random victims - yes, that does happen, but a murderer picking someone close to home is something that will emotionally affect a much greater fraction of the readers.
There was some very definite mirroring between the victims lives and our investigators lives in this novel. As Kay herself said, "It seems this is all about people loving people who don't love them back", and while it might have been a bit of a cliched theme it was pulled off tremendously. Emily Steiner loves a young boy called Wren, who invites her to meet him as a joke, breaking her little heart - Creek Lindsey has inappropriate feelings for Emily so tries to look after her, and is very jealous of her relationship with Wren. Almost the same thing is happening to Kay, Wesley and Marino. Despite the fact that Benton has been married since before 'Postmortem', he decides that this is the book in which he will embark on an illicit love affair with Kay, despite the fact that he knows Marino (his best friend!) has feelings for her. Kay knows that she could never love Marino, but doesn't want to hurt him, so completely ignores that the situation is going on - this, of course, hurts him even more. Benton makes no attempt to leave his wife, so he doesn't seem to love her or Kay that much, because he's hurting both of them.
This, combined with Lucy's story, means that the entire novel seems to be revolving around unrequited and inappropriate love. Lucy's in love with Carrie, and Carrie is straight and manipulating her feelings - unrequited love. Emily loves her mother, but her mother loves attention - unrequited love leading to inappropriate love. The same can be said for Lucy and her mother, Kay's sister Dorothy, but their story doesn't end as dramatically. You'd think it would get a bit preachy, but surprisingly it stays interesting because the investigations are still the focal point - this isn't a romance novel with a bit of crime, this is a crime novel that is dealing with people's lives.
The most interesting part of the novel for me was definitely The Body Farm itself. The Body Farm is a facility where scientists can research the effects of decomposition in different environments, with different weather and temperatures taken into consideration. This means that there are cadavers scattered around the area, set up in different ways, so that they can monitor and better find time of death based on decomposition. I had never heard of the concept before, and of course I was stunned to find out that it was a real thing that actually exists - it seems like such a strange idea, even if it is a brilliant way to examine something that really needs to be known about. It would have been good if The Body Farm had featured more heavily: consider the fact that the book is titled after it, then consider the fact that only ten or so pages actually take place inside the facility...
I will admit that the ending did seem a tad melodramatic. I was surprised Marino wasn't already dead, seeing as how none of the team had seen him for days and none of them were really too worried about that, so Kay running in and saving him at the last second just didn't seem feasible. The last three books have been foreshadowing his eventual demise, so I'm just thinking that it's going to happen in the next book now, instead.

Verdict:
'The Body Farm' is definitely the best Kay Scarpetta novel to date. It just feels like Patricia Cornwell finally got the perfect toss-up between investigation and character development, leading to a rich and well-explored plot and brilliant interactions between the characters. Kay is definitely starting to become more in control of her own existence - some of the facets of her personality that annoyed me in the earlier novels have been worn away, but the development is very natural so she still feels like the same person. I think the relationships between her and Benton and her and Marino will continue to become more dimensional and more layered, which cannot be a bad thing.
I loved the fact that the killer was a female, I loved the linking in of Temple Brooks Gault and I loved the fact that they were using a copycat killer - all three definitely added to the plot and the depth of the novel. If Patricia Cornwell can write another novel like this one, this series will just keep getting better. I feel as though she's crafted her writing into such a place that she doesn't need to use tricks to get attention - we don't need another book that takes place over nearly a year and includes ten murders, we just need a couple of characters, a tightly crafted plot and a two week time scale - much better.
I am interested to see what happens with Lucy's character. Kay seems to have finally accepted the fact that she can be a mother towards the girl despite not being her biological mother, so I'm hoping we're going to get some more interactions between them in the future. I'm also anticipating what Patricia can do with Lucy's character - being the first openly gay character in our core cast, and with this being the '90s, it could be good to see how she progressed with her, and how her attitude changes in future books.
I won't be too surprised if Benton and Kay continue their affair - there's a good opportunity for someone to find out and start blackmailing them, so that's likely to be used. I'd be happier if Benton just went ahead and left his wife like a decent person, instead of sneaking around behind her back. Despite the fact that it's morally wrong, I actually really enjoy their relationship and their interactions are brilliant - after the death of Mark, Kay really deserves someone who will care for her and who won't psychologically destroy her, and I think it might make her character even stronger if she had a perfectly stable home life.

I'm hoping Gault will pop up again - maybe not in the next book, but maybe in a couple books time - because it still feels as though there's unresolved business there, but other than that this was a pretty perfect specimen of a crime novel for me. 

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.