Category Archives: Patricia Cornwell

Crime Fiction Alphabet: Q is for Quantico

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For this instalment of the crime fiction alphabet we’re heading to a location in America that has become well-known to readers (and watchers) of crime fiction. Quantico is actually a small town (population 561) in Prince William County, Virginia but for crime fiction readers the name generally conjures up images of one of the military or law enforcement facilities that surround the town. It is the site of US Marine Corps’ largest bases and contains within it (among other things) the Marine Corps Officer Candidates School, the Marine Corps Research Center, the Marine Corps Brig (a military prison), the FBI Training Academy (incorporating the much-featured-in-crime-fiction Behavioural Analysis Unit) and a training facility for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Collectively these facilities and the people who work in them have become familiar to crime fiction fans.

One of the first books to feature Quantico in any detail was Thomas Harris’ Silence of the Lambs (published in 1988 though set five-years earlier) in which a young FBI trainee, Clarice Starling, is asked by Jack Crawford, head of the psychological profiling unit, to present a profiling questionnaire to Hannibal Lecter, a sociopath serving life in prison for a series of brutal murders he committed. As well as being in charge of building up profilers of all the worst killers in custody, Crawford is also on the trail of a serial killer who has been nicknamed Buffalo Bill who has killed several women in a particularly gruesome way. It becomes clear that Lecter knows something about the killer and a battle of wits begins.

Given that several characters in her long-running Kay Scarpetta series work for the FBI in one way or another, it’s no surprise that more than one of Patricia Cornwell‘s books features Quantico in some way. In the fifth book of the series, The Body Farm (1994), Scarpetta is investigating the murder of a young girl which has similar elements to earlier murders which were carried out by someone who has eluded the FBI. Kay is helped by her niece, Lucy Farinelli, who is now an intern at the FBI and looks set for a career at Quantico’s computer engineering facility before she engages in a disastrous relationship with a fellow Quantico employee.

Gene Riehl’s Quantico Rules (2003) is a bit of a departure from the serial killer hunts that tend to be the focus of novels in which the Quantico facilities are featured. Puller Monk is an FBI agent along with being a compulsive gambler and jolly good liar (he actually practices defeating lie detectors). He heads up the Special Inquiries (SPIN) unit and as the book opens is undertaking a routine (but thorough) background check of Judge Brenda Thompson who is the first African American woman nominated as a candidate for the Supreme Court. He learns that she has lied about what she was doing during a 3 week period over 30 years earlier and when he follows that lead a very nasty secret starts to unravel.

It’s also worth re-mentioning the book I featured for the letter Q the last time this meme was in play. Greg Bear’s Quantico (2007) is a cross between science and crime fiction. It is set in the near future when a massive terrorist attack has occurred in the US and the book follows the stories of two Quantico-based FBI agents, one a Muslim of Arabic heritage and one a man trying to live up to the legendary status of his father.

P.D. Martin‘s series featuring Australian-born FBI Profiler Sophie Anderson starts out with Body Count (2007). Sophie has left her job with the Australian police to join the FBI and when this book opens she has undertaken her training and is working at the Quantico-based Behavioural Analysis Unit. She starts experiencing nightmares of crime scenes. This would be fairly normal for a law enforcement officer except these are detailed images of real scenes that Sophie has not been anywhere near. Is she going mad or does she really have a capacity to see things from a killer’s point of view.

Many crime other crime fighters, such Leighton Gage‘s creation Chief Inspector Mario Silva of the Brazilian Federal Police who features in five books so far starting with Blood of the Wicked, spend time training at Quantico either as part of the narratives in which they appear or via their back-stories so the facilities really are an almost ubiquitous feature of crime fiction. Is this a feature of crime novels you have noticed? Have I missed your favourite Quantico-based book?

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Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise is hosting the crime fiction alphabet meme which requires the posting of an article relating to the letter of the week. Do join in the fun by reading the posts and/or contributing one of your own. You don’t have to write every week.

Crime Fiction Alphabet – P is for Postmortem

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My contribution to the Crime Fiction Alphabet this week is a discussion of former crime reporter and forensic analyst Patricia Cornwell’s debut novel, Postmortem. It was published in 1990, won the Edgar, Creasey, Anthony, and Macavity awards in a single year and ushered in a new sub-genre of crime fiction in which forensics is king. The success of this book and its follow-up novels is thought to have influenced a swag of similar writers (including Kathy Reichs, Tess Gerritsen and Karin Slaughter) and also TV shows like CSI.

As Postmortem opens Dr Kay Scarpetta, Chief Medical Examiner for Richmond Virginia, is sleeping uneasily. For each of the previous three weeks a woman had been strangled to death on Friday night and Scarpetta worries there will be another death. When the phone call from Detective Pete Marino comes at 2:33AM on Saturday morning she is called to another scene where there are few clues to the perpetrator of the horrid murder. Scarpetta and Marino work with FBI Profiler Benton Wesley to track the killer down using what little evidence they can find as well as manipulating the media to play with the killer’s head.

Several elements of this book would, today, read like hackneyed clichés but Cornwell was breaking new ground when she released Postmortem. For example, at that time the DNA profiling was a relatively new technique but it is incorporated cleverly into the story. Having such a strong female character as the protagonist of the book, especially one engaged in such a gruesome activity as dissecting dead people, was something else that was something of a departure for crime fiction at that time. Kay Scarpetta is a long way from Miss Marple.

I can recall thoroughly enjoying Postmortem (as much as you can enjoy a book in which women are dying horribly). There was a genuine puzzle to solve and the characters did engage me and, although violence was graphically depicted it did not seem to be out of step with the story or my own sensibilities. I read the subsequent novels as they were published and though Point of Origin (book #9 in the series) was the last one I actually liked I slogged it out right up until 2004′s Trace (book #13) which I deliberately left on a bus after finishing because I thought it was one of the worst books I’d ever read. I haven’t read a Scarpetta novel since (though I did have a go at one of Cornwell’s Win Garano novellas last year).

I’m not entirely sure if it’s me that has changed or Cornwell’s writing. From my perspective the plots seemed to get both more graphically violent and more ridiculously unbelievable. In Trace for example a character who has been dead for several books makes a miraculous reappearance accompanied by a nonsensical cover story. When combined with the ludicrous things that Scarpetta’s niece Lucy (computer genius, FBI superstar and borderline psychopath) gets away with this direction for the series consigned it to the ‘jumped the shark’ category for me. However, I try not to let my later disappointment overshadow the fact that Postmortem is a great piece of crime fiction.

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About 18 months ago Cornwell was the featured author on the BBC World Book Club and Postmortem was the book under discussion. You can listen to the show’s archive in which Cornwell is questioned by the show’s host and its audience should you be so inclined (the link will open your computer’s streaming audio player).

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My previous contributions to the Crime fiction alphabet are

  • A is for Absolution [Caro Ramsay]
  • B is for Bones [Jan Burke]
  • C is for Contest [Matthew Reilly]
  • D is for Deadlock [Sara Paretsky]
  • E is for Entombed [Linda Fairstein]
  • F is for Fortress [Gabrielle Lord]
  • G is for Gambit [Rex Stout]
  • H is for Heartsick [Chelsea Cain]
  • I is for Inheritance [Keith Baker]
  • J is for Jigsaw [Anthea Fraser]
  • K is for Kisscut [Karin Slaughter]
  • L is for Lost [Michael Robotham]
  • M is for Marker [Robin Cook]
  • N is for Nerve [Dick Francis]
  • O is for Outsider [John Francome]

    • Review: The Front by Patricia Cornwell

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    Title: The Front (the 2nd book in the Win Garano series)

    Author: Patricia Cornwell

    Publisher:Hachette Audio UK [2008]

    ISBN: N/A (acquired via download fromiTunes)

    Length: 4hrs 26mins (unabridged)

    Narrator: Kate Reading

    I used to be a huge fan of Cornwell’s Scarpettabooks but some years ago found they had become bogged down in unnecessary length and the plots were increasingly convoluted and ridiculous. I eventually gave up all together after Tracein 2004. Since then I have, very occasionally, wondered whether I am missing out on anything by forsaking all things Cornwell so when I noticed The Front, the second of a series featuring Massachusetts State Police investigator Win Garano, was short (under 5 hours or less than 200 pages in the print version) and on special at iTunes I took the opportunity to check it out.

    Monique Lamont is a District Attorney with greater political ambitions and as part of her long term publicity strategy she orders Win Garano, a special investigator assigned to her office, to re-open a 40 year old case in which a young English woman living in Boston was murdered. Lamont seems to think they can tie the murder in to the infamous Boston Strangler case and Garano is both skeptical and reluctant to have anything to do with the investigation. He is supposed to be helped by a female cop nick-named Stump (which we discover has nothing to do with the fact she has a prosthetic leg) but she is occupied by other things including investigating a series of robberies.

    The book is better than that last Scarpetta I read in that the story moves at a faster pace and is a more manageable length. But it reads more like the treatment for a new, not very good, TV series than a novel. There’s little depth to the characters and they all felt like stereotypes to me (the ice maiden female, her disgruntled, smarter underling, the feisty disabled woman, the hippy grandmother…).  There’s lots of dialogue but most of it is the kind of unrealistic psycho babble that no two humans would ever actually engage in.

    The real downfall though is the plot. After meandering down some not terribly interesting alleys (maybe someone could make the theft of copper from building sites interesting but Cornwell couldn’t) the protagonist makes a huge leap of logic and the whole thing is wrapped up neatly. Except for the Scotland Yard connection: I still don’t know what that was about and I even re-played the last hour to make sure I hadn’t been daydreaming. Even though the book is short Cornwell manages to find room for a swag of irrelevant subjects including terrorism, the mafia, JFK’s Presidency and the aforementioned Scotland Yard.  I hope Apple paid her for the numerous mentions of their famous phone because the gratuitous product placement didn’t help the book in any way. No one I know mentions the brand of their phone every time they check the thing for messages.

    I can’t say I was disappointed by the book because I didn’t set out with tremendously high expectations. Perhaps that’s an unfair way to head into a book but this is the woman who revived a favoured character from the dead in the silliest plot device I’ve ever had the misfortune to read. Given that I didn’t pay much for it and it didn’t occupy a lot of my time I guess I’m happy to know for sure that I’m missing nothing by reading other authors in preference to Cornwell.

    Audibook specific comments: I thought the narrator did a good job given the book was so dialogue-heavy and there were a lot of characters but as an Aussie I didn’t notice what was, according to other reviewers, a less than stellar Boston accent.

    My rating 2/5

    Other stuff

    None of my usual sources have reviewed thisbook. I’m sure if you Googlethe title you’ll find the a swag of professional reviews which sing the book’s praises but in an undoubtedly pointless stance against the tsunami that is brand-name publishing I’m not going to link to them here.