Why was scarpetta fired

She rolls the right sock in her fingers and lifts her right foot up onto her other knee. She puts her toes into the sock and pulls it up over her foot. It goes on twisted. She straightens it out and puts her foot back on the floor. And in the case of this book, Cornwell would waste 11 pages describing the weave, age, texture of the sock and contemplating whether the sock actually wants to be worn. My Bookish Ways. Reading at Dawn. Black Cat Book Reviews. Iron rails the rusty brown of old blood cut across a cracked paved road that leads deeper into the Lowcountry.

Determined to find out what happened to her former deputy chief, Jack Fielding, murdered six months earlier, Kay Scarpetta travels to the Georgia Prison for Women, where an inmate has information not only on Fielding, but also on a string of grisly killings. The murder of an Atlanta family years ago, a young woman on death row, and the inexplicable deaths of homeless people as far away as California seem unrelated. And she is the only one who can stop it.

Mystery Maven Blog. Under My Apple Tree. Where the Red Willow and Wapiti Rivers merge in the Peace Region of northwestern Alberta, dark green waters tumble and foam around fallen trees and gray sandy islets with white pebble shores. A woman has vanished while digging a dinosaur bone bed in the remote wilderness of Canada.

Somehow, the only evidence has made its way to the inbox of Chief Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta, over two thousand miles away in Boston. She has no idea why. When she turns to those around her, Scarpetta finds that the danger and suspicion have penetrated even her closest circles.

Her niece Lucy speaks in riddles. Feeling alone and betrayed, Scarpetta is tempted by someone from her past as she tracks a killer both cunning and cruel. The clangor of the phone violates the relentless roll of rain beating the roof like drumsticks. She also fears the case may have a connection with her computer genius niece, Lucy. Clearly the body has been posed with chilling premeditation that is symbolic and meant to shock, and Scarpetta has reason to worry that the person responsible is the Capital Murderer, whose most recent sexual homicides have terrorized Washington, D.

This book was published in November The copy I received was not one of the original size, it was a smaller version. The book itself is in very good condition just not the standard size. Mysterious Reviews.

A Bookish Libraria. Mary Silva Books. My Review of Flesh and Blood. Copper flashes like shards of aventurine glass on top of the old brick wall behind our house. If so, why are all of the coins dated and so shiny they could be newly minted?

A high school music teacher has been shot with uncanny precision as he unloaded groceries from his car. No one has heard or seen a thing. In this 22 nd Scarpetta novel, the master forensic sleuth finds herself in the unsettling pursuit of a serial sniper who leaves no incriminating evidence except fragments of copper.

The shots seem impossible, yet they are so perfect they cause instant death. The victims appear to have had nothing in common, and there is no pattern to indicate where the killer will strike next. First New Jersey, then Massachusetts, and then the murky depths off the coast of South Florida, where Scarpetta investigates a shipwreck, looking for answers that only she can discover and analyze. If These Books Could Talk.

Books Are Life-Vita Libri. Nocturnal Library. My Shelf Esteem. My Review of Depraved Heart. Kay Scarpetta is working a suspicious death scene in Cambridge, Massachusetts when an emergency alert sounds on her phone. A video link lands in her text messages and seems to be from her computer genius niece Lucy.

But how can it be? As Scarpetta watches she begins to learn frightening secrets about her niece, whom she has loved and raised like a daughter.

That film clip and then others sent soon after raise dangerous legal implications that increasingly isolate Scarpetta and leave her confused, worried, and not knowing where to turn. Not even Lucy. The diabolical presence behind what unfolds seems obvious—but strangely, not to the FBI. Espresso Coco. Bibliophile Book Club. The Last Word- Book Review.

Karina Pinella. Buried Under Books. Book Reviews To Ponder. My Review of Chaos. Beyond the brick wall bordering Harvard Yard, four tall chimneys and a gray slate roof with white-painted dormers peek through the branches of hardwood trees.

In the quiet of twilight, on an early autumn day, twenty-six-year-old Elisa Vandersteel is killed while riding her bicycle along the Charles River. It appears she was struck by lightning—except the weather is perfectly clear with not a cloud in sight.

Her investigation becomes complicated when she begins receiving a flurry of bizarre poems from an anonymous cyberbully who calls himself Tailend Charlie. She also enlists the help of her niece, Lucy. Chaos is coming, or something like that. The Last Word Book Review. The Poisoned Martini. The Savvy Reader. Rhapsody In Books Weblog. The Real Book Spy. Lynn S Farris. One More Chapter.

Forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta has returned to Virginia as the chief medical examiner. She and her husband Benton Wesley, now a forensic psychologist with the U. At the same time a catastrophe occurs on a top secret private laboratory in outer space, and at least two scientists aboard are found dead.

Appointed to the highly classified Doomsday Commission that specializes in sensitive national security cases, Scarpetta is summoned to the White House Situation Room to work the case remotely, dispatching astronauts from the International Space Station to deal with the scene and the bodies. She works the first crime scene in space as an apparent serial killer strikes again, this time even closer to home. Almost literally in her own back yard.

In recent books Scarpetta has become way too introspective. The recent books spend half the book in introspection: Does Benton know something that Kay does not; does Lucy know something that Kay does not; do Lucy and Benton know something that Kay does not know. I say give up the many, many pages of introspection and consentrate on solving the crime.

Thank you for the opportunity to comment. I was a huge fan of this series until—as Alan says—she got too inside herself. I need a new one! I read all the books in the Scarpetta series, as well as the two other series of characters Patricia Cornwell started. I stopped reading the series a few years ago. Scarpetta, she told herself, refusing to pay attention to her feelings.

Now he was implying that Scarpetta is so unimportant and unsuccessful that the governor has never heard of her. Marcus was insulting her. Nonsense, she countered herself. All he wanted was help with a difficult case, and why shouldn't he track her down? It's not unusual for CEOs fired from major corporations to be called upon later for advice and consultation.

And she's not going to Aspen, she reminded herself. You won't have any problem with the governor, Kay. She's too ambitious, actually, too focused on her Washington aspirations, the truth be told, to care about what's going on in my office. Marcus went on in his smooth southern accent, trying to disabuse Scarpetta of the idea that her riding back into town after being ridden out of it five years earlier would cause controversy or even be noticed.

She wasn't really convinced, but she was thinking about Aspen. She was thinking about Benton, about his being in Aspen without her. She has time on her hands, she was thinking, so she could take on another case because she suddenly has more time. Scarpetta drives slowly around the block where she was headquartered in an early stage of her life that now seems as finished as something can be.

Puffs of dust drift up as machines assault the carcass of her old building like giant yellow insects. Metal blades and buckets clank and thud against concrete and dirt. Trucks and earth-moving machines roll and jerk. Tires crush and steel belts rip. But someone should have told me. Someone should have told you, that someone being the prickless wonder who took your place. He begs you to fly here when you haven't set foot in Richmond for five years and can't bother to tell you the old joint's being torn down.

This morning Marino is a deliberate, menacing mixture of messages in black cargo pants, black police boots, a black vinyl jacket, and an LAPD baseball cap. Obvious to Scarpetta is his determination to look like a tough big-city outsider because he still resents the people in this stubborn small city who mistreated him or dissed him or bossed him around when he was a detective here.

Rarely does it occur to him that when he was written up, suspended, transferred, or demoted, usually he deserved it, that when people are rude to him, usually he provokes them. Slouched in the seat with sunglasses on, Marino looks a bit silly to Scarpetta, who knows, for example, that he hates all things celebrity, that he especially hates the entertainment industry and the people, including cops, who are desperate to be part of it.

The cap was a wise-guy gift from her niece, Lucy, who recently opened an office in Los Angeles, or Lost Angeles, as Marino calls it. So here is Marino, returning to his own lost city, Richmond, and he has choreographed his guest appearance by looking exactly like what he's not.

I guess Benton's pretty pissed. Nothing ever takes a few days. Bet you never get to Aspen. What case is he working? Marino looks out the window and is silent for a moment, and she can almost hear him thinking about her relationship with Benton Wesley, and she knows Marino wonders about them, probably constantly and in ways that are unseemly.

Somehow he knows that she has been distant from Benton, physically distant, since they got back together, and it angers and humiliates her that Marino would detect such a thing.

If anyone would figure it out, he would. When Benton was gone all those years, a part of her left. When he came back, not all of her did, and she doesn't know why. Seems I heard something about it, about needing another parking deck down here because of them opening Main Street Station.

I forget who told me. It was a while ago. I don't even remember who I heard it from. I warned you about coming here. Now look what we find right off. Throughout the series Marino plays a great part in the upbringing of Lucy, although it seems that he has issues with her sexuality.

In Book of the Dead , Marino's not so secret crush on Scarpetta comes to a head. He reacts badly to news of Scarpetta's engagement to Benton Wesley, and after getting drunk and under the influence of a testosterone drug, he attacks Kay and almost rapes her. His actions lead to a confrontation with Lucy and her almost shooting him, after which Marino disappears.

It is unknown if he has killed himself or just runs away as the book ends. Marino reappears in Scarpetta. Benton is an FBI profiler. He and Scarpetta work together on many cases, at first on a strictly professional level. As their relationship progresses, they end up having an affair, which goes on for years.

Once Benton is no longer with his wife he wishes to marry Kay, but she resists because she is too independent. In Point of Origin Benton disappears; a body is found at the scene of a fire, badly burned and showing signs of having been tortured extensively. Kay identifies the body as Benton's by the Breitling watch she had given him.

In Blow Fly it is later revealed that he is not dead, but had been hiding for years in a witness protection program. In the early books Benton is described as the unit chief of the FBI profilers with a master's degree in psychology, working out of Quantico.

In Point of Origin he has supposedly retired from the FBI and is working as a private consultant, though in The Scarpetta Factor it is implied that he was still under the FBI's control and was forced into the witness program, then into a retirement that he still resents.

Biography Lists News Also Viewed. Kay Scarpetta. She has struggled with anorexia, alcohol and depression, among other dramas. P atricia Cornwell is no stranger to guns. She's big on personal security and never wants to leave herself vulnerable. The author, who began her career as a reporter and then worked at the office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Richmond, Virginia, still subscribes to a lot of different services to keep up with what's going on in the field, and has many professional contacts who will fill her in on the latest technologies.

The last time we met, three years ago, a bodyguard stood outside her London hotel suite throughout our interview and the security-conscious author - whose forensic mysteries, including Postmortem and The Body Farm, have sold more than million copies and made her a millionaire - admitted her fears are greater because she's seen many crime scenes, and knows what one human being can do to another.

Today, she tells me about her visit to a firing range in Texas to try out some of the newest, most high-tech weaponry, so she could write accurately about the gun in her 22nd Scarpetta novel, Flesh And Blood, which sees her heroine, forensic sleuth Dr Kay Scarpetta, on the hunt for a serial sniper who leaves no evidence except fragments of copper.

Receive today's headlines directly to your inbox every morning and evening, with our free daily newsletter. Enter email address This field is required Sign Up. Her novels could give us a lot to worry about, yet Cornwell doesn't believe that the criminal possibilities that are explored in her books will give ideas to real criminals in the real world. They are going to come up with what works for them. Born in Miami, Cornwell's father, a lawyer, walked out on Christmas Day, ignoring his five-year-old daughter's attempts to cling to his leg.

Her mother moved to an evangelical community in North Carolina, down the road from famous preacher Billy Graham and his wife.