‘Point Of Origin’ Doesn’T Disappoint
“Point of Origin” by Patricia Cornwell (Putnam, $25.95)
It’s time again for another title in Patricia Cornwell’s continuing series featuring Kay Scarpetta, chief medical examiner of the Commonwealth of Virginia, to fly up the best-seller lists as reviewers chorus their praise.
In fact, it debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list this week.
“Point of Origin” is better than last year’s “Unnatural Exposure,” which depended too heavily on a fatal virus described in suppurating detail. Nevertheless, as long as she’s writing about Scarpetta, Cornwell never truly disappoints.
It’s hard to understand why she’s so dynamically readable. Maybe it’s something about the tension represented in Scarpetta’s character. The doctor is imperturbable when she’s up to her latex covered elbows in a poor dead bugger’s chest cavity, but heaven forbid somebody should dog-ear a page in one of her books. Scarpetta is perhaps the most joyless vessel of Italian blood since Caligula, yet Cornwell ably presents all these contradictions in a totally straight-faced manner.
“Point of Origin” begins with a threatening letter from Carrie Grethen, a psychopathic multiple murderer who several books ago was captured by Scarpetta working in league with her lover, the then-FBI agent Benton Wesley, as well as her niece Lucy, a technological idiot savant. Benton has since resigned from the bureau but remains a consultant; Lucy, concerned about FBI scrutiny of her private life - she’s a lesbian - also has resigned and accepted a job with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
Now Grethen, who was Lucy’s first female lover, has escaped from the mental hospital where she was awaiting trial.
No sooner has Scarpetta read the coded letter from Grethen than the phone rings with a message from crusty homicide Detective Pete Marino, who tells Scarpetta to be ready to catch a helicopter before dawn. A farmhouse belonging to a media mogul has just burned to the ground in Virginia’s horse country, and the owner, Kenneth Sparkes, was believed to be in it.
Scarpetta finds a body in the sodden devastation, the body of a young blond woman fused to a shower door. Quicker than you can say “ghoulish detail alert!” another fire is reported, with another charred body found in the wreckage.
Scarpetta realizes her plans for a week of long walks on the beach with Wesley must be put aside, so she contents herself with lecturing her niece about the danger Lucy and her career are in now that Carrie Grethen has escaped. She then returns to Richmond to do the post-mortem and to ponder the larger meaning of the homicide-disguised-as-arson cases.
Once the news of Grethen’s escape reaches the FBI, Wesley is called to New York to join the bureau’s search for her. Meanwhile, Grethen tightens the screws by releasing a coherent letter to the press in which she argues that she was framed by Benton, the FBI’S chief profiler on the earlier case, and not incidentally Kay Scarpetta’s lover. The evidence, she claims, was doctored to make the bureau look good. The letter goes on to argue that Lucy was a hapless hacker who qualified for the FBI only as a result of her aunt’s influence.
And still Scarpetta remains stoic in the decomp room. “We got a big fat mess,” her assistant says, to which she replies, “Then we use a scalpel.”
A few more twists remain before a final, horrifying tragedy and then a muted restoration of order. Until next year. …