Port Mortuary (Kay Scarpetta) - Softcover

Cornwell, Patricia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1594134790 ISBN 13: 9781594134791

Publisher: Large Print Press, 2011

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

Patricia Cornwell's most recent bestsellers include Red Mist, Port Mortuary, and Portrait of a Killer: Jack the RipperCase Closed. Her earlier works include Postmortemthe only novel to win five major crime awards in a single yearand Cruel and Unusual, which won Britains prestigious Gold Dagger Award for the best crime
novel of 1993. Dr. Kay Scarpetta herself won the 1999 Sherlock Award for the best detective created by an American author.

From AudioFile:

n this latest installment in the Scarpetta series, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, noted forensic pathologist, is now director of the Cambridge Forensic Center in Massachusetts. While she's been away at Dover Air Force Base on a six-month assignment, things have gone very wrong at the CFC; the bodies are piling up; her second in command, Jack Fielding, has gone missing; and Kay may be the next target. This dark, brooding story, told in primarily the first person, is mired in detail that lends little and irritates much. Kate Burton's delivery is often rushed. Her credible variation of accents lends interest but cannot overcome the listener's weariness in the face of so much introspection and useless melodrama. Not Cornwell's best effort. A.C.P. © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

About this edition

• Publisher: Large Print Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1594134790
• ISBN 13: 9781594134791
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 654