โ Scribed by Patricia Cornwell
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
When your everyday life is filled with death it's easy to find yourself a little edgy. The audio version of Patricia Cornwell's Point of Origin gives fans of her familiar heroine, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, a little something extra, a chance to hear the deep hurt and burning cynicism of the chief medical examiner's biting words. "You don't put your hands inside their ruined bodies and touch and measure their wounds.... You see clean case files and glossy photos and cold crime scenes. You spend more time with the killers than with those they ripped from life. And maybe you sleep better than I do, too. Maybe you still dream because you aren't afraid to."
Perhaps because Kate Reading has also narrated Cornwell's Unnatural Exposure and Cause of Death, her voice conveys experience and the history of what has come before, allowing listeners to hear between the lines. Using a subtle but effective range of vocal inflections, Reading lifts the characters off the page and carries them along as the plot spins ever faster, tangling Scarpetta in a snarl of arson, deceit, and psychopathic murder. With her arch nemesis making threats and suspicious fires leaving calcified corpses, Dr. Scarpetta's long-overdue romantic getaway has gone up in smoke. It's just one more day at the morgue, and Point of Origin, another hit in the popular series of Scarpetta mysteries, finds the good doctor's attitude honed razor sharp. (Running time: 11 hours, eight cassettes) --George Laney
Cornwell fans who relish her Kay Scarpetta stories for the postmortem findings will welcome this tale of twisted minds and the gory havoc they cause. Acronym fans will also be pleased. This tale opens with the complete destruction by fire of a Virginia horse farm, the owner of which was said to be in London. As consultant to the FBI and the ATF's NRT (that's the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms' National Response Team), Scarpetta joins the investigation on site and discovers some remains of a young woman in the master bath. Although the origin of the fire remains a mystery, research turns up two similar unsolved incidents from years earlier, female victims who were dead before the accompanying conflagration. Another fire disguising another murder, and the escape of Carrie Grethen, evil woman partner of Scarpetta's now dead archenemy Temple Gault, from a New York City hospital for the criminally insane, ups Scarpetta's anxiety level about both her beloved, brilliant niece, Lucy, who was seduced by Grethen in The Body Farm, and her lover, psychological profiler Benton Wesley. A third fire covers a third personally devastating death before Scarpetta is able to finger Grethen's new diabolical partner and survive a harrowing finale in a helicopter. Although Cornwell repeatedly tells us how anxious, strung out or devastated Scarpetta feels in the face of Grethen's evil threats, there's very little dramatization of these powerfully emotional conditions. The author is convincing mainly in the delivery of chilling forensic details. One million first printing; $750,000 ad/promo; Literary Guild, Doubleday Book Club and Mystery Guild main selections; simultaneous Putnam Berkley audio.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
๐ SIMILAR VOLUMES
Dr Kay Scarpetta, Chief Medical Examiner and consulting pathologist for the federal law enforcement agency ATF, is called out to a farmhouse in Virginia which has been destroyed by fire. In the ruins of the house she finds a body which tells a story of a violent and grisly murder. The fire has come
"Sears its way into the psyche" (_ATLANTA JOURNAL CONSTITUTION_) with a NEW PACKAGE and NEW AUTHOR INTRODUCTION. The clues to a series of remorseless killings go up in smoke--and only Kay Scarpetta can find them.
**Sears its way into the psyche (*ATLANTA JOURNAL CONSTITUTION*) with a NEW PACKAGE and NEW AUTHOR INTRODUCTION.** The clues to a series of remorseless killings go up in smokeand only Kay Scarpetta can find them. ### Amazon.com Review Virginia's chief medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta is getting
**Includes a free exclusivemultimedia CD, which contains interviews with the author,a screensaver, wallpaper and many more features**Carrie Grethen, partner in crime to William Temple Gault,has escaped from prison. Before she does so she sendsKay Scarpetta a message which makes it all too clear that
SUMMARY: "The nearly surreal opening scene of Unnatural Exposure makes Cornwell's latest Kay Scarpetta immediately gripping and quite possibly literary", declared Patricia Holt in her front-page San Francisco Chronicle review of the author's most recent instant #1 bestseller. "Patricia Cornwell reta
Most people who have reached their eighties without raising children have every right to believe that they will go on not raising them, and Judith and I were no different until the day they turned up with the social worker, neatly scrubbed and pressed inside their vac-suits and carrying cases with a