My Weekly Book

The Body Farm – Patricia Cornwell

It’s a long time since a book’s really grabbed me in the sense of my not being able to put it down and go and attend to the far more important stuff that is demanding my attention. But this one did. I’d picked it up and, before I knew it, several hours and two hundred pages had flown past. This is a series novel – I think it’s number five in a saga featuring the forensic scientist and medical examiner Dr Kay Scarpetta and her crime-fighting state law enforcement and FBI colleagues. The standout feature is a daring and well-executed plot featuring a child murder - and the very last killer you might expect – circled round and about by a thicket of distractions, both personal and professional. These are designed to knock our heroine off the killer’s scent and prevent her from keeping the protective eye on her colleagues, friends and family that she instinctively realises they need. As I understand is generally true of Cornwell, there is a wealth of forensic, medical, geographic and police procedural detail to build the world and make it gripping and absorbing for the reader.

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I decided to pull this off the shelf as a direct result of two books read recently. One was Bill Bass’s own account of the founding of the Body Farm, called Death’s Acre. The other was Patricia Cornwell’s non-fictional Jack the Ripper: Portrait of a Killer - the first book by her that I’d read. Having enjoyed both of these, The Body Farm did seem like the logical next step. In fact, the University of Tennessee’s Forensic Anthropology Facility only features to a fairly limited extent and its impact on the story is surprisingly muted. I can see how if this was your first exposure to the concept it would be thrilling and shocking in about equal measure. But these days you can read dozens of articles about The Body Farm and its offshoots online, watch documentaries or even enjoy its founder’s own account, as mentioned above. Its shock value has lessened considerably – but it is used well here and I certainly got the impression that Dr Bass has been left with a very positive feeling for the crime novelist who made this respected academic and forensic scientist famous in a whole new field.

I think my main criticisms of the book stemmed from the fact that I read it out of sequence – something that is mightily against my natural inclination, but which I do from time to time in order to stop the towering heights of what UK Bookcrossers know as Mount Toobie (To Be Read) from finally crashing down on my head and burying me. I was a bit misled by the serial killer plot strand – I later realised that I was expecting it to be tied up in a nice, neat bow with the child-murder and the Scarpetta family storyline, simply because I hadn’t appreciated to what extent it was an ongoing thing. This left me turning the last page and feeling damned unsatisfied. “Is that it?” I may have cried aloud, and I think my dissatisfaction was definitely ramped up by that foul habit publishers have of including the first chapter of the next novel at the end of the one you are reading – thus utterly throwing out your expectations of how many pages the author has left to get their house in order, plotwise. One thing I found highly amusing was the depiction of Scarpetta’s family relationships - she can face a killer coolly but a few well-chosen words from her mother has her in a “homicidal rage”. We may not be able to personally identify with Scarpetta’s work in law enforcement, but I think most of us will recognise the sensation of having to deal with family members who know exactly how to push our buttons.

I find Cornwell a real enigma. On the one hand she has undeniable links to the Republican party, the Bush family and the religious right in America. On the other, this novel features both a strong female lead who is in charge of her professional and sexual lives, and a sympathetic and well-rounded (if somewhat damaged) lesbian character. Cornwell’s analysis of the Jack the Ripper murders includes an undeniable feminist sensibility in her bid to recast elements of the story around the experience of the murderer’s female victims, as opposed to merely fetishising the killer himself. Ordinarily the first items in this list would be enough to make me very, very wary of reading her work. But, as the rest of them demonstrate, she seems to be a long way indeed from promoting the kind of political and moral agenda that I had feared I would find – and which would have led to this book being thrown aside within 30 pages. Looked at one way, she’s the perpetrator of Internet censorship for trying to silence her critics while, from the opposite point of view, she’s been the victim of a particularly scary stalker. What we can’t fathom fascinates us, evidently. And, in summary, this was a great read, and definitely enough of an advert for the author to persuade me to start the Scarpetta series from the beginning.

Lower slopes of Mount Toobie, ahoy!

Some links:

• Patricia Cornwell bibliography
• Patricia Cornwell biography
• Wikipedia: Patricia Cornwell

This entry was posted on Monday, July 30th, 2007 at 12:34 pm and is filed under 2007 reading challenge, Reads I recommend. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.