Unnatural Death

Sasquatch
Nightwatch

Unnatural Death
by Patricia Cornwell
Little Brown
ISBN: 9781408728697

Warning: Some very slight spoilers.

And once again it’s already time for my annual ritual, starting the new Patricia Cornwell book I’m inevitably gifted on Christmas Day. This year’s novel, Unnatural Death, sees her return to the exploits of her most popular literary character, Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta, plus various of the other much loved regular characters who make up the rich background tapestry of the Scarpetta novels... including Lucy, Benton, Marino and even Kay’s sister Dorothy, who you remember is now married to Marino.

Like many of her recent novels (well, I say recent, she’s been doing this kind of thing for at least a decade and I’m sure if I went and revisited her early works, it’s something I’d be more aware of now), this one is set in a very small time frame. The majority of the novel takes place over a 24 hour period... with an epilogue chapter taking place eight days later. Indeed, it takes Cornwell well over a hundred pages to get her central characters to the ‘scene of the crime’ in this one but, as you would expect of a writer of Cornwell’s high calibre, none of this journey is wasted and it helps set up a truly uneasy air about why this particular double homicide... the Unnatural Death of the title... is unusually disturbing. Not least of which is the general environment where the bodies need to be recovered from... which is both hard to get a helicopter to without crashing it and, similarly hazardous due to all manner of reasons I won’t detail here.

As almost a distraction... but I know how well Cornwell researches her books... we also have evidence uncovered that a Bigfoot (aka Sasquatch) is in the area of the scene of the crime and, normally I would act the sceptic here as that being a fantastical element of the story but, well, I trust this woman’s research and if she says there really are such things... I’m going to take her word for it. There is apparently more evidence to suggest yay rather than nay these days, it would seem. And while the evidence of the presence of this species near the murder site is ruled out straight away as being something which the Sasquatch would have had a hand in regarding the double murder, there are also some nice, unexplained things which also happen when Scarpetta and her colleagues are recovering the bodies, which are nicely speculated on by the end of the novel. Let’s just put it this way, there is a suggestion that Big Foot doesn’t always have to be hostile and can, perhaps, even be helpful.

Let me also say that the fight comes to Scarpetta’s door, in small and disturbing ways, long before the scene of the crime is left and the bodies recovered. And then things get even grimmer when Kay suddenly finds herself performing an autopsy in front of a virtual audience in a special unit erected for such a procedure, as she and another character are pulled into a certain ‘confidence’ that neither of them has welcomed into their lives.

Talking of which, I don’t want to say too much about this set of scenes and the chills they may invoke in some readers but I will say that they will probably affect and be present as a caution in Scarpetta’s life for at least another novel or two and, furthermore, those readers who have been with the character throughout her long fictional history will certainly appreciate where things are heading... once a certain set of previously ‘false information’ has ben revealed.

All of which leads ot a couple of nasty incidents based on high tech threats and the usual mix of piece by piece, clue by clue deductions that inevitably lead Scarpetta and her husband Benton to inadvertently put themselves in harms way at certain points in the narrative. There are also a few younger characters which, I think may have been seeded into the text a book or two ago, to also live on as future regulars in the series... or be cannon fodder, who knows because, with the level of future threat now uncovered for Scarpetta and her loved ones, the resolution of that particular problem may well seem a little light and miraculous if at least some characters the readers care about don’t die as part of that solution.

And there you have it... I don’t want to say much of anything else about Unnatural Death other than to assure lovers of the writer and her characters that this is yet another, top notch, addictive Scarpetta novel by one of the greatest living thriller writers. I absolutely loved this one.