Book Review: Port Mortuary by Patricia Cornwell

Hello Readers!

I feel like it's been ages since my last post. As my grad school courses have progressed, I'm finding less and less time to read.

However, I submitted this week's assignment yesterday. Today we're getting 1-4 inches of snow with 40 mph winds, so it's the perfect day to declare Lazy Sunday and stay in to read all day.

I've been reading Patricia Cornwell's novel Port Mortuary for a little less than three weeks now. A friend, Candice, loaned it to me almost one full year ago. I'm still working to make it through all the books on my shelf. Somehow, the number of unread books/audiobooks increased to 170?!?! Darn! I'm trying to get it below 150, but it's so hard to turn down a good book!

Anyway, back to the review. Here's the summary of Port Mortuary, via Goodreads:

Port Mortuary, the title of Patricia Cornwell's 18th Scarpetta novel, is literally a port for the dead. In this fast-paced story, a treacherous path from Scarpetta's past merges with the high tech highway she now finds herself on. We travel back to the beginning of her professional career, when she enlisted in the Air Force to pay off her medical school debt and found herself ensnared in a gruesome case of what seemed to be vicious, racially motivated hate crimes against two Americans in South Africa. Now, more than twenty years and many career successes later, her secret military ties have drawn her to Dover Air Force Base, where she has been immersed in a training fellowship to master the art of CT-assisted virtual autopsy--a procedure the White House has mandated that she introduce in the private sector.

As the chief of the new Cambridge Forensic Center in Massachusetts, a joint venture of the state and federal governments and MIT, Scarpetta is confronted with a case that could shut down her new facility and ruin her personally and professionally. A young man drops dead, apparently from a cardiac arrhythmia, eerily close to Scarpetta's new Cambridge home. But when his body is examined the next morning, there are stunning indications that he may have been alive when he was zipped inside a pouch and locked insider the Center's cooler. Various 3-D radiology scans reveal more shocking details about internal injuries unlike any Scarpetta has ever seen. These suggest the possibility of a conspiracy to cause mass casualties. She realizes that she is fighting a cunning and cruel enemy that is invisible as she races against time to discover who and why before more people die.

In Port Mortuary, Patricia Cornwell brings Scarpetta together with Marino, Benton, and Lucy in an intimate way that is reminiscent of the early novels, and we welcome a voice we haven't heard in years. The point of view is Scarpetta's, and this is her story.

Lately, I haven't been very impressed with Cornwell's novels. I really loved her six years ago, when I was in high school, but just haven't enjoyed any of her books I've read recently. I was excited for Port Mortuary because it was supposed to be like her old novels. I thought this would help me to identify if it's me and my attitude that's changed, or if I just really don't like Cornwell's recent stuff. I think it's the second one.

This novel was extremely slow, in spite of the promise for a fast-paced thriller listed in the flap. I found myself daydreaming while reading because the novel was so far from engaging. Scarpetta didn't seem to undergo much change in the novel, and it was poorly written. For example, there are three explanations on pages 384-85 in the hardcover novel where Cornwell uses analogies with "as if..." If things are so similar to something else within a short span of pages, just come out and say it, please! I felt like she was beating a dead horse with the quantity of analogies used.

Readers, I'm sorry this sounds like such a negative review. Bottom line? I think Cornwell's lost her touch. If you're currently a Cornwell/Scarpetta fan, do check out this novel. You may enjoy it. If you're at all on the fence, like me, I would not encourage you to pick it up.

Here are my stats:
Port Mortuary by Patricia Cornwell
Rating: 3/5
Pages: 496
2012 Reading Goal: 3,474/15,000

Seeing as how it is a lazy Sunday, I'm going to try to burn through one more book (a shorter one) if I can. Ahhhh, I sure do love lazy days...

Happy Readings! :)