Copyright 1999 by Cornwell Enterprises, Inc. Published by G.P Putnam & Sons.

There was a time, years ago, when I read a lot of Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta books because Jett was a big fan. Then I ran into one – can’t remember the name now – that was a real stinker. One of the worst books I have ever read. So I haven’t touched Cornwell in years. But then I found one that looked interesting…

Well, this one is not as bad as the one that swore me off her, but it isn’t great either.

Scarpetta is, in this book, the Chief Medical Examiner for the Commonwealth of Virginia. She autopsies corpses and helps solve murder mysteries. She has an emotionally distant mother, a narcissistic sister, a loving but angry lesbian niece, an angry detective friend and a young colleague (in this book) who is both committing crimes and undermining her career. She is dealing with the recent death of her lover and a new Deputy Chief of Police in Richmond who is determined to get her fired.

There is a lot of unpleasantness in Scarpetta’s life and it make for an unpleasant book.

Besides having a very lesbian niece, there are rumors surrounding the sexual interests of the Deputy Chief and Scarpetta herself. There is a strong undercurrent of lesbian love and deviant sexual practices.

The mystery in this case centers on a badly decomposed body that is discovered in a shipping container aboard a ship docked in Richmond’s deep water harbor. He obviously made the trip across the Atlantic as a corpse, so the mystery immediately takes on an international flavor. A strange tattoo on the body’s decomposing back and some strange aspects of his death – soon matched to the MO of the murder of a convenience store clerk in Richmond – attract the interest of Interpol. Scarpetta and her angry buddy Marino make a trek to Lyon to consult on the case, which Interpol believes involves the strange son of a prominent French family.

Of course they are right and Scarpetta is instrumental in bringing him down. But she does take the night in Paris to bed a young, rich ATF agent that she doesn’t really like. Or maybe she does.

In any case, she screwed him so she can’t be a lesbian, right?

The book is not bad, but not great either. Much of it is a huge downer.

4 out of 10.

Copyright 2019 by Columbus Rose, Ltd. Published by Grand Central Publishing, New York.

This is #5 in Baldacci’s Memory Man series, but the first of the series that I have read. I always feel that I am missing something when I don’t start at the beginning and I am undoubtedly right. There are many references in this book to events that presumably were the subject of previous books in the series. Missing some of the context certainly diminishes my enjoyment of the book.

But I will give you my take.

Amos Decker, the protagonist and the eponymous “memory man”, suffered a brain injury in college while playing football at Ohio State. As a result of his injury he remembers everything, no matter how minor or how long ago (but not before the injury). This mental abnormality plays a large role in Redemption as Decker – now an FBI agent – is approached by a man that was sent to prison for life for murdering 4 people, largely due to Decker’s investigation – his first homicide case as a police officer 13 years earlier in Burlington OH. The man, who has only weeks to live (he was released from prison due to his impending death) pleads with Decker to clear him as he was innocent.

That very night the man is murdered. Decker searches his infallible memory for any evidence that he screwed up the investigation. He initially can’t see any problem in what the police did 13 years prior, but the fact that the man was murdered (why murder a dying man?) and some doubts about how well he investigated the murders (he never, for example, read the autopsy reports) gnaw at him. He decides to look into it. His suspicion that he somehow messed up drives him to seek redemption (hence the title).

Needless to say, when he starts pulling at the strings, the case begins to unravel. More people start to die. He himself is shot at. It doesn’t take a genius – or a man with infallible memory – to realize the something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

I won’t go into the details of a very twisted plot, but I will tell you that the motive for all the mayhem is very large and very deep. But I couldn’t get past the feeling that it was all a little too contrived. Not realistic. Too many murders in a small town (it reminded me of Cabot Cove, home of Jessica Fletcher of Murder She Wrote – a little town with more murders per capita than Detroit or Miami). So while I enjoyed the book, I can’t rate it highly.

6 out of 10.