Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice ( The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. No wonder Scarpetta asks, “When did my workplace become such a soap opera?” Answer: at least 10 years ago.Īnother sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.Ī week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been.

But most of the characters are members of Scarpetta’s entourage, the main conflicts involve infighting among the regulars, and the killer turns out to be a familiar nemesis Scarpetta thought she’d left for dead several installments back. For a while, the peripheral presence of the president makes you wonder if this will be the case that finally takes the primary focus off the investigator’s private life. But these complications are only the prelude to a banquet of homicide past and present, as Scarpetta and Marino realize when they link Nari’s murder to a series of killings in New Jersey. And Leo Gantz, a student at Nari’s school, has confessed to his murder, even though he couldn’t possibly have done it. Bizarrely, the first tweets announcing his death seem to have preceded it by 45 minutes. Now he’s in the news for quite a different reason. Jamal Nari was a high school music teacher who became a minor celebrity when his name was mistakenly placed on a terrorist watch list he claimed government persecution, and he ended up having a beer with the president. Clearly there’s trouble afoot, though she’s not sure what form it will take until five minutes later, when a call from her old friend and former employee Pete Marino, now a detective with the Cambridge Police, summons her to the scene of a shooting. Shortly after everyone’s favorite forensic pathologist ( Dust, 2013, etc.) receives a sinister email from a correspondent dubbed Copperhead, she goes outside to find seven pennies-all polished, all turned heads-up, all dated 1981-on her garden wall. But no Florida vacation for you and your husband, FBI profiler Benton Wesley-not because President Barack Obama is visiting Cambridge, but because a deranged sniper has come to town.

Flesh and blood by patricia cornwell