Blow Fly Limited Edition (Hardcover)

The plot, such as it is, is nonsensical. We are supposed to believe that Benton Wesley's death was faked, for the benefit of Scarpetta, with the long term aim of using Kay to bring about the demise of the Chardonneau family by means of convoluted false messages, red herrings etc. At the end of the day, Welsey simpy goes to their home in Baton Rouge and kills some of them - why did he need to forge various pretexts to get Kay there etc, when all he had to do was burst in a la Rambo and shoot 'em up?

Underneath this slapdash writing lurks some dodgy political views, namely that good people are justified in doing bad things to bad people if it removes the bad guys (the references to Iraq and 9/11 telegraph this unsavoury viewpoint several times).

Clearly Cornwall has nothing more to say about Scarpetta, Marino, Lucy et al and should stop this series now. Sadly, the ludicrously unlikely escape of the Wolf Man means that more yawn inducing antics involving Wolfie going after Kay will ensue..

I normally enjoy Cornwell's novels as light relief on a plane, but this one was seriously disappointing. There's only one crime scene investigation, towards the end, of a largely irrelevant murder, and the rest of the book seems to be made up of the guilt and neuroses of the central characters as they all move away from the professional orbits that (once) made them so interesting. The Wolfman (yawn!) and his twin brother Jay are trotted out YET AGAIN as the bad boys of the piece, only to be despatched 'offscreen' at the end. I agree with other readers that the ending was sudden and flat - I convinced myself that I had missed a chapter and resorted to shaking the novel to see if the extra pages would suddenly materialise, explaining what went down at the shack and how Benton killed Jay and what happened to the Wolfman. No such luck. This didn't seem like a cliffhanger, more like a "I can't be bothered" from the author. I shall seriously debate buying any future Cornwell books - "Jack The Ripper" was a shoddy piece of scholarship, and this was lazily written throughout, lacking the taut plot and original characterisation that made the others in the series so enjoyable. A real shame.