Chaos, By Patricia Cornwell
Back in the saddle. Or on the horse? Wagon? Something like that.
So, I’ll flatter myself and imagine that you’d noticed, but I’ve not posted anything for ages. I moved house, went on a massive holiday, and had to travel for work and basically, I just couldn’t find time or the mental energy to keep writing.
But, for the most part, I kept reading. This whole thing has helped me develop a pretty strong reading habit, where I’ll always fit in at least a page every day - and usually that turns into quite a bit more. But even just one page I find is enough to keep going, and not give up “being a reader”.
So, I’ve read a whole bunch of books, and I haven’t reviewed them, and I probably won’t. You’re just going to have to take my word for it.
Anyway - on to the book.
I’m gonna fess up right now, once I finished this book, I threw it in a recycling bin at Boston airport because my luggage was over-weight. I might like books, but I’m not paying $30 to save one that cost me 20 pence. And I’m not even sure it was worth paying that for it.
I weirdly ended up reading a book about a murder, set in Boston, while I was in Boston, right where it happened. Second time that’s happened to me, which is crazy, given that I chose the book completely at random.
The cover says that it’s a Scarpetta novel, and I guess if you’re a fan (a Cornwell-ite? Cornwellian?) you’d know what that means, but I don’t (well, didn’t). Turns out Dr Kay Scarpetta is a lady pathologist who works for the police in Massachusetts. She’s a bit of a big deal, and does fancy talks at Harvard - which sounds good, but it’s just down the road, so maybe it’s just because she doesn’t charge much for mileage. There you go. You’re up to date.
So, her husband is an FBI profiler (power couple or what?) and they end up both separately working on the same case, but not allowed to tell each other that they are. Which you’d think would be the hilarious set up for some kind of Ben Still comedy, but there’s nothing all that weird about it. That’s their deal apparently.
Some crazy crank has a huge vendetta against her and has been sending her weird threat messages, that are sung in Italian (obvs) and then there are a load of weird murders, and of course, because this is a story, they’re all connected.
The person that wants to kill her turns out to be her billionaire cousin’s ex girlfriend… I lost track of why. And she did it by using some kind of weird metal that’s only found in meteorites, to make a hyper conductive kind of fibre to then give people electric shocks. If that sounds like it makes fuck all sense… I can relate. It doesn’t. Didn’t.
So, what appears to look like a whole string of highly technically complex serial murders that have got the FBI and everyone else worried are really just someone doing trial runs, to eventually carry out a vendetta murder by probably the most absurdly complex and absurd means ever.
I can’t even be bothered to really go into it much more than that, because it would just be wasting everyone’s time. There may have been more to it than that, but not enough for you to care, I promise.
It felt like someone trying so desperately to come up with an unexpected ending and a creative means of killing people, and just ending up settling for something weird and stupid.
There you go. I thought it was all a bit stupid.
In other news - I also read a John Grisham book. I got over 100 pages in before realising I had definitely read it before. It all sounded a bit familiar but I’d assumed that was just because every possible story about an Ivy League law student starting a career in law and then not liking it, has been written.
I’m sure that says something but I don’t know what.
And for the first time ever, if you want my copy of this book, you can’t have it. Sorry. Like I said, it went in the bin in Boston. I think I’ll cope with the sense of loss.