Predator

Now a Director of the National Forensic Academy, Dr Kay Scarpetta is able to use her formidable skills on myriad investigations. But someone is aware of her every move, manipulating her towards a situation where she would become the prey.

Florida is full of human predators, and they all give Dr Kay Scarpetta the opportunity and the means to do what she does best - persuading the dead to speak to her. And in Boston, Benton Wesley is working on a secret case involving convicted killers. It is a project which gives Scarpetta deep disquiet, as does the behaviour of her niece, Lucy, who is spending too much time in cheap bars looking for casual pick-ups. The Academy is called when a woman's body is found in Boston. She has been tortured, sexually abused, her body tattooed with handprints. The same sort of handprints Lucy had seen on the flesh of her latest pick-up. Meanwhile, Scarpetta and Marino are investigating the disappearance of a family in Florida, called in by a concerned neighbour, but as they search and find the tell-tale signs of abduction rather than disappearance, they also discover that someone had assumed the identity of the caller, and she is now dead. They've been set up, and it becomes clear that someone is tracking their every move.

"It's not often a crime novel offers such a smorgasbord of oddball elements, including autopsy advice, methods of combating tree blight, the use of spiders in sadomasochist torture and couples covering the sexual and psychological waterfronts. There's even a little nasty fun at the expense of television psychoanalysts. With geographic locations switching slightly faster than the speed of sound, it's to Reading's credit that she smoothes out the ultra rumpled excesses of Cornwell's mind-boggling plot and takes full advantage of the yarn's narrator-friendly present tense. Having given voice to several earlier books in the series, she's got the main characters down cold. Her Dr. Kay Scarpetta is all snarky professional reserve and personal insecurity. Self-loathing lesbian niece Lucy, sounds properly troublesome and troubled, with an added catch in the throat due to a secret she's keeping. Pete Marino, the bullet-headed, gym rat security chief of the Lucy-originated National Forensic Academy, sounds so gruff and aggressive, he should be kept on a chain leash. And Scarpetta's inamorato, Benton Wesley, whose study of mass murderers' brain patterns gives the novel its title, is, as his name suggests, the very model of a dry, annoyingly passive-aggressive personality. The joke here — intended or not — is that the novel's protagonists are almost as mentally or emotionally disturbed as its homicidal villains. Cornwell seems to have grown weary of the lot of them. But there's still a flicker of life left and Reading has the skill to make the most of it." Publishers Weekly (Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.)

"The contrived plot that drags Scarpetta out of the classroom and onto the killing fields in pursuit of a madman?plays out in too fragmented a form to sustain much suspense." New York Times

"[A] solid and insightful psychological thriller that sports a nice little twist." Denver Post

"Cornwell is able to deliver a highly charged, rather spooky novel with her usual panache....[R]eaders will agree that Predator is one of Patricia Cornwell's best works to date." Bookreporter.com

Dr. Kay Scarpetta, freelancing with the National Forensic Academy in Florida, takes charge of a case that stretches from steamy Florida to snowbound Boston. The teasing psychological clues lead Scarpetta and her team to suspect that they are hunting someone with a cunning and malevolent mind.

Patricia Cornwell is currently Director of Applied Forensic Science at the National Forensic Academy.