Patricia Cornwell's long-running series on life support?

Cornwell's Scarpetta tale flatlines with dizzying plot and superficial characters

By Clayton Moore, Special to the Rocky

Published December 4, 2008 at 7 p.m.

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A legendary crime writer once cautioned me about writers who go to the well of series characters too often. The risk of diluting the characteristics that make a series lead gripping, he warned, is very real, and the consequences aren't pretty.

There's some merit in belting one out for the fans every now and then, but readers will need the forensic science habit of a CSI addict - or a real weak spot for Patricia Cornwell's recurring characters - to fully embrace Scarpetta, the latest thriller from the best-selling author.

The title character, forensic authority Kay Scarpetta, has been Cornwell's bread and butter for 20 years, first appearing in Postmortem and headlining 16 subsequent novels, most recently Book of the Dead. This hefty entry is a sincere attempt to bolster Scarpetta's contemporary relevance and tie up certain loose ends left in the series. But Cornwell's sizable cast and their dizzying entanglements are bogged down in manufactured mysteries, their overlapping plots clumsily intertwined to challenge the wits of her heroine.

As the book opens, Scarpetta is startlingly domesticated. Married to FBI shrink Benton Wesley, the good doctor has a new job as a chief medical examiner for the Northeastern District of Massachusetts and a sideline commenting on crime for CNN.

Scarpetta's precocious niece, Lucy Farinelli, is still around, running a forensic computer lab in New York, while her destructive former partner, investigator Pete Marino, who, fans will remember, drunkenly assaulted Scarpetta during their last encounter, is also furtively working in the city.

These threads converge when Scarpetta is called by her husband (characteristically, while she's elbow-deep in a victim's chest cavity) to meet with a bizarre patient in the mental health ward of New York's Bellevue Hospital.

Resembling "a she-devil in blood scrubs," Scarpetta is mistakenly dropped off at the grim iron gates of the old Bellevue Hospital by her cab driver, who thinks she's a patient. Making her way to the modern Bellevue Hospital Center, Scarpetta meets her quandary there, in the person of patient Oscar Bane.

Bane is a dwarf who teaches the history of psychiatry at a local college and now stands accused of sexually assaulting and murdering his girlfriend, Terri. Injured by an unknown assailant, Bane claims Scarpetta is the only one who can help him achieve "mind justice."

"When your mind is stolen," Bane says, explaining his peculiar expression, "justice is getting it back. It's her fault. She could have stopped it. I don't have my mind back. I don't have Terri. All I have is you. Please help me."

As usual, Scarpetta finds the evidence suspect. The wounds Oscar claims he suffered in the attack look self-inflicted, while the murder victim has DNA from different sources on her person. Scarpetta also finds herself in a precarious legal position, caught between serving as Bane's physician and the state's medical expert, while Bane, protected by doctor-patient privilege, warns her against revealing his secrets.

Bane isn't the only one who knows far too much about Scarpetta's current status, judging from two creepy plotlines that are likely inspired by Cornwell's personal experience with the pitfalls of fame. A cryptic online gossip columnist for Gotham Gotcha is cyber-stalking Scarpetta, in between posting deplorable items like Marilyn Monroe's autopsy photos. The anonymous author, offering accusatory details about the vicious reunion between Scarpetta and Marino, manages to incite the wrath of both.

Later, when Lucy gets her hands on Terri's laptop, she finds an incriminating cache of data that includes hundreds of articles, photographs and other media focused on Scarpetta's lurid investigatory career.

Cornwell has a gift for crafting complex characters that she applies well to Scarpetta's secondary players. The articulate Bane plays out like a broken doppelganger of George C. Chesbro's underrated dwarf detective, Robert "Mongo" Frederickson. "If you want to figure out where evil comes from, you have to follow where it goes," Bane tells Scarpetta. "Did it end up in a stab wound? Did it end up in the decapitated head of a hiker? Did it end up in discrimination? What part of our brain remains primitive in a world where violent aggression and hatred are counterproductive to survival?"

The author also gives a nuanced take on Pete Marino, hired by the D.A. investigating the Bane murder case. The book finds him struggling with the addictions in his life (not the least of which is Scarpetta herself), feeling "as if someone had tethered his emotions to a cinder block." Marino is a rare example of an author creating a very human monster without caricature, cliche or artifice.

It's too bad that the same can't be said of Cornwell's leads. Lucy's voice remains that of the shrill adolescent that marked her earlier appearances, while Scarpetta has become something of a cipher. Hindered by the unremarkable third-person narration the author adopted five books ago, this once-novel detective becomes merely the channel by which Cornwell delivers her grisly scientific knowledge of the evil that men do, not the driving force behind her own stories. A character with this kind of staying power deserves a better chance to shine, before her well runs dry.

Clayton Moore is a freelance writer living in Superior.

Scarpetta

* By Patricia Cornwell. Putnam, 512 pages, $27.95.

* Grade: C

Troubled youth

Cornwell grew up in an unloving foster home after her mother was hospitalized for mental illness. In a recent interview, she noted that Scarpetta is the mother she would have liked to have had. "Scarpetta is a fantasy of what I wanted around me when I was a kid," she said. "When I was held hostage in that foster home, if Scarpetta had walked in that house, she'd have said, 'You're out of here!' She would have saved me."

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