Annotation #4 - Postmortem

Title: Postmortem
Author: Patricia Cornwell
Publisher: Macmillan (January 9th, 1990)
Pages: 352
ISBN: 9780733477154
Genre: Mystery

A ringing phone wakes Dr. Kay Scarpetta in the middle of the night. She picks up the phone and Detective Pete Marino tells her there has been a murder and she is needed at the crime scene. It looks to be the latest in a series of unsolved murders in the Richmond, Virginia area. Dr. Scarpetta immediately leaves to meet Detective Marion at the scene of crime. The killer leaves very little behind and victims seem to be picked at random but one thing is the same. All of the victims have been brutally strangled.

Dr. Scarpetta is the chief medical examiner for the state of Virginia and she is one of only a few female chief medical examiners in the nation. She has a tense working relationship with local law enforcement and an even worse relationship with her boss. Dr. Scarpetta is very intelligent and strong willed. Her investigation of the case leads her to work with the police, FBI, lawyers, politicians, and newspaper reporters. Her high profile involvement in the case eventually puts her life in danger.

Not only does Dr. Scarpetta have a very demanding job, her ten-year-old niece is staying with her as well. She is a precocious ten-year-old who happens to be a computer whiz. This makes things much more complicated for Dr. Scarpetta with an already demanding workload and a serial killer on the streets. All of this does not stop her from becoming romantically involved with a local commonwealth attorney.

Even though this book is somewhat dated (1990), I thought it was an exciting story and an interesting mystery. This book had medical/biology jargon which was dated. For example, DNA testing was mentioned in the book and it was “new and had only gone to trial a couple of times in Virginia”. Of course the technology was also dated. Very few computers were around and very little information was available electronically. There was a lot of time in the book used to describe databases and computer networks. One thing that I thought was a little funny was the amount of smoking talked about in the book. Everyone was smoking in everyone’s office. I’m not sure why this caught me off guard considering when the story took place and the location but it did.

This is the first book of the Scarpetta series. There are 17 books in the series to date. I’ve never read books in a series but I do think the characters in the book were interesting and I would like to see what happens to them in the other books. Especially, the mouthy 10 year old niece! I do admit that someone I work with had read many of the books in this series and I had to ask what happens to her. I can see how people get attached to characters and continue to read about them.

I would like to read some more of the books in this series. I think this book’s best quality was the CSI like quality of the story. It did include very graphic descriptions of the murders and many autopsies, but I felt it added to the story. The strong female main character also made the story more interesting and could be something other readers would enjoy. The medical/technical details were dated but only because of the age of the book. This would improve with later books in the series. The story and the characters were very good. I would recommend this book to anyone that enjoys a good mystery with medical/technical investigation.