The Body Farm (book)

Patricia Cornwell The Body Farm (1994) A mystery. The investigator is Kate Scarpetta, a lawyer and forensic pathologist. The victim is an 11-year-old girl, and it seems the murderer is a serial killer who has escaped from prison. He may be planning revenge on Kate and her team members. The sub-plot involves Kate's niece, framed for a break-in into a secure area and computer system (on which she is working). The murderer turns out to be the girl's mother (Munchhausen syndrome at work.) The personal relationships continue on from previous books, and will no doubt continue into subsequent ones. The 1st person p.o.v. doesn't always work, partly because Kate is undemonstrative (countering the Italian stereotype), and partly because Cornwell mixes genres, love-romance with mystery.
     On the whole, though, the book works. The procedural bits are convincing, the dialogue both characterising and plot-structuring, Kate is a sympathetic hero who is beginning to be damaged by her profession, and knows it. She also suffers from a dysfunctional family that for once doesn't seem inserted for dramatic effect, but fits her character and helps account for her life history (what little we get of it in one book.) The bleakness of her mood reminds one of the noir PI novels of Chandler and his followers, but it's really intended to be more elegiac. Like many modern crime writers, Cornwell assumes her readers are familiar with the genre and doesn't bother explaining the obvious. This occasionally makes for an unsettling abruptness and a need to reread a passage. I'll be reading more of these. *** (1999) Update 2012: I did read a few more in this series, but was eventually put off by the unvarying formula, and Cornwell's taste for gore. Scarpetta's backstory became more melodramatic, too, which didn't help.