{"id":10439,"date":"2021-08-25T08:55:30","date_gmt":"2021-08-25T12:55:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/?p=10439"},"modified":"2021-08-25T08:55:33","modified_gmt":"2021-08-25T12:55:33","slug":"black-notice-by-patricia-cornwell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/2021\/08\/25\/black-notice-by-patricia-cornwell\/","title":{"rendered":"“Black Notice” by Patricia Cornwell"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Copyright 1999 by Cornwell Enterprises, Inc. Published by G.P Putnam & Sons.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, this one is not as bad as the one that swore me off her, but it isn’t great either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is a lot of unpleasantness in Scarpetta’s life and it make for an unpleasant book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In any case, she screwed him so she can’t be a lesbian, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book is not bad, but not great either. Much of it is a huge downer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4 out of 10.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading »<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[59],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1VniU-2In","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10439"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10439\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10442,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10439\/revisions\/10442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}