Chaos

As a longtime reader of Bernard Cornwell, I have seen Patricia Cornwell novels on the shelves of book shops since the 1990s but had not read one of her novels until now.  I was given Chaos, which is the 24th novel in the series.  The story opens on the Harvard Campus in Cambridge.  Kay is walking across the campus and noting the extreme heat when she is contacted by longtime colleague, Pete Marino.  Pete is upset and demands to know where she is.  She is on her way to meet her husband for dinner.  Marino intercepts her and discusses a complaint call about her.  Both seem to make a lot of this call, giving the impression they are paranoid.  Kay has hardly sat down for dinner with her husband, FBI Profiler Benton Wesley, when she gets a call about a dead woman in a park by the Charles River.  Kay is a medical examiner and leaves to investigate, again joined by Pete Marino.  Eventually, Kay examines the body and determines the woman died from electrocution.  She heads back to her facility and performs an autopsy in the wee hours of the morning, confirming electrocution but now finding traces of an unusual alloy that lead her to decide it was murder.  She arrives home to find her archnemesis, Carrie Grethen, in the backyard of her house, holding family members hostage by means of an electrified drone that is hovering nearby.  Kay uses a nearby fishing pole to bring down the drone and save the day.

It took almost 350 pages before Kay was examining the corpse by the river.  During all this time, she, Marino, Lucy (her niece), various dunderheaded policemen speculated one what could have happened.  Kay was constantly curious if the dead woman was the same one she had met twice that very day.  When she finally arrived on scene, the reader is happy for this to be resolved so Kay could stop obsessing over it.  Conversations were hard to follow as Kay would think about her history with the person in the conversation.

"Good to see you, Doc," random character says.

Kay thinks about how she met random character, how well she knows random character, and various events in their shared history.  She ponders how random character is unusually talented in their field and Kay knows that and has always known that.  She would not want anyone else working in this position.

"Good to see you," she replied.

By the time she gets around to the next part of the conversation, one has to go back and see what was being said.  Worse, there are times when characters provide information that both know, but it gets provided nonetheless for benefit of the reader.  For example, when talking to Lucy, she mentions that Carrie supposedly died in a helicopter crash off the coast of North Carolina.  In addition to the constant rehashing of previous novels in the series and the excessive character sketches and location descriptions, the narrative is further muddied by the impending arrival of Kay's sister.  As with everything, Kay obsesses about her younger sister who is shallow, vain, and dimwitted.  To listen to her thoughts, Kay finds her sister to have no redeeming qualities and yet she is going out of her way to welcome her.  Ugh.

The characters are all unlikeable.  Kay is arrogant, paranoid, obsessive, unfocused, and self-conscious.  She frequently thinks about how she is going to upbraid someone for their temerity and then doesn't.  There is what she thinks she should do and then what she actually does.  That both are revealed give her a wishy-washy personality.  Despite constantly demanding that no one jump to conclusions or speculate on what might have happened, she spends much of the lead up to her initial examination speculating what might have happened based on the secondhand reports she has received.  Heck, she has already decided that Carrie Grethen is involved before examining the corpse.  Pete Marino is always either angry or frustrated.  He liberally seasons his conversation 'damn' to show how angry he is.  He was a blowhard who, like Kay, couldn't keep his speculation and conjecture to himself.  By contrast, Benton was unflappable and cold.  Of course, the endless character backgrounds tell us that Kay had an affair with him while he was married to his first wife.  Oh, great.  She later mentions how she had a fling with a colleague.  The more I learned of Dr. Scarpetta, the less I liked her.

Most of the novel is repetitive filler.  The novel could have been cut in half and still dragged.  Too much inner monologue from Kay and not enough events.  The villains are taken down with ease but promise to return in a future novel.  Not that I'll be reading it.

Hard pass.  Do not read this book.