Barbara Ludman Black Notice by Patricia Cornwell (Warner Books) Patricia Cornwell is calming down. Either that, or those of us who have read all her books are getting accustomed to the horrors of the autopsy room. So when forensic pathologist Dr Kay Scarpetta slides the skin off a decomposing corpse, or when the kidney falls apart at a touch, we barely flinch. In fact the most disgusting element of Black Notice is Scarpetta’s long-time friend and collaborator, Police Captain Pete Marino. Demoted by a new deputy chief – the kind of woman who wears silk underwear under her blue serge uniform and forgets to button up her shirt – his slide into vulgar wounded adolescence reaches new depths. The plot revolves around a body they’ve found stuffed in a container in the hold of a ship that’s been at sea for some time, of the strange silky blond hairs stuck to it here and there, and the women who begin turning up beaten to death shortly afterwards. There are spinoffs in all directions – Scarpetta’s inability to face the death of her lover, an FBI agent knocked off in the previous book; her troubled niece, about to take down a dangerous Miami mob; the new deputy chief, creating havoc throughout the police department; and a hacker who’s calling himself Scarpetta and destroying her reputation worldwide.
For a while, too, it looks as if Cornwell is taking Scarpetta down some highways even more bizarre than the ones she usually travels. Silky hairs? Bite marks? The title of this latest in a very popular series comes from Interpol’s colour-coded notices for different sorts of enquiries. The notice for an unidentified body is black.