Patricia Cornwell, Trace

I was very dissapointed with this Trace by Patricia Cornwell. This left too many story threads from her last book hanging. No connection with where the last book left off and this one started. Almost felt that it was about different characters. I was troubled by some of the changes to the characters, they did not have the same feel to them. All of her earlier books could not put down. I just had to see what came next. This was hard to finish. Seems like it is missing the feel from her earlier books in this series.

Trace

Patricia Cornwell

Putnam, Sept 2004, $26.95, 436 pp.

ISBN 0399152199

Kay Scarpetta and Benton Wesley were planning a two-week vacation in his Aspen cottage but at the last minute he cancels because he is counseling Lucy's girlfriend Henri who was attacked and almost killed while in bed in Luc's home. Someone is stalking one of the ladies, leaving a picture of an eye on her on her outside door and planting a bomb in her mailbox. Lucy is busy hunting down the maniac.

In the meantime, Kay is called back to Virginia by the new Medical Examiner because outside forces wants a highly renowned ME to examine the body of fourteen year old Gilly Paulson. During the autopsy, Scarpetta discovers some bruises that proves she was killed while laying on her back while somebody's knee pressed her into her pillow so she couldn't breathe.

In the burned house across the way from Gilley's home, Henri and Marcus find mortuary magazines addressed to Kay's old work address in Richmond. Fingerprints show that the culprit is the same person who killed a child and almost murdered Lucy's lover but finding that person will take all the resources at their disposal.

TRACE, like BLOW FLY, is told in the third person so readers have many viewpoints, a plot device that lets the audience know what Kay, Benton, Lucy and the killer are thinking. Kay is her usual brilliant self, ignoring anyone who gets in the way of finding the truth about the killer, and Lucy is working extra hard to find the stalker before the perp strikes again. Patricia Cornwell writes the best crime thrillers on the market today and readers will find TRACE a work that is one of the author's best.

Harriet Klausner