Unnatural Exposure (Kay Scarpetta Series #8) » (Reissue)

Readers of Patricia Cornwell's crime novels need a strong stomach, both for the gruesome details and the suspenseful turns of her plots. With medical examiner Kay Scarpetta, Cornwell created a cool and compelling heroine who repeatedly draws readers back for more.

Always packed with unrelieved tension and constant surprises, a new novel from Patricia Cornwell is cause for celebration. Virginia's chief medical examiner, Kay Scarpetta, is called in to examine the remains of a woman found in a landfill, her body dismembered in the same expert way she'd seen before. And while Scarpetta is investigating, the bold killer contacts her through the Internet, inviting her to download the police photos, and signs off with the chilling name, deadoc. When Scarpetta and her niece discover that the victim was exposed to a rare smallpox-like virus before she died, she realizes that they re up against a killer with access to an incredible arsenal of deadly force -- and now it's directed at her!

Publishers Weekly

In this return to the luridly fascinating world of Dr. Kay Scarpetta, Cornwell delivers the goods her fans love best. Moving from serial dismemberment to a high-tech virus that threatens a pox-like epidemic, this eighth appearance (following last year's Cause of Death) of the compulsive forensics pathologist who is Virginia's Medical Examiner and a consultant to the FBI ranges from Dublin to Richmond, Va., making stops at a tiny barrier island in the Chesapeake Bay and the government's huge biological defense facility in Dugway, Utah. Tours of Graceland in Memphis and Atlanta's Center for Disease Control are added before the closing in London. The dismembered corpse of an elderly woman found in a Virginia landfill doesn't quite fit the profile of earlier dismemberments; also puzzling is the pattern of pustules found on the torso. As Scarpetta follows the forensics clues, she faces the unscrupled ambitions of a slick FBI agent; the difficulties encountered by Lucy, her beloved niece, computer genius and a lesbian; her own exposure to the unidentified, sometimes fatal virus (and subsequent quarantine); and the turbulent ambivalence of her feelings for Agent Wesley Benton. Fully as satisfying as previous Kay Scarpetta novels, this one is built on a sturdy workmanlike plot and doles out rewards in the gory, high-tech details, allowing readers to overlook the lapses of Cornwell's non-Scarpetta venture in this year's earlier "Hornet's Nest."