Chaos: A Scarpetta Novel

Written by Patricia Cornwell

Narrated by Susan Ericksen

#1 New York Times bestselling author Patricia Cornwell returns with the remarkable twenty-fourth thriller in her popular high-stakes series starring medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta.

In the quiet of twilight, on an early autumn day, twenty-six-year-old Elisa Vandersteel is killed while riding her bicycle along the Charles River. It appears she was struck by lightning—except the weather is perfectly clear with not a cloud in sight. Dr. Kay Scarpetta, the Cambridge Forensic Center’s director and chief, decides at the scene that this is no accidental Act of God.

Her investigation becomes complicated when she begins receiving a flurry of bizarre poems from an anonymous cyberbully who calls himself Tailend Charlie. Though subsequent lab results support Scarpetta’s conclusions, the threatening messages don’t stop. When the tenth poem arrives exactly twenty-four hours after Elisa’s death, Scarpetta begins to suspect the harasser is involved, and sounds the alarm to her investigative partner Pete Marino and her husband, FBI analyst Benton Wesley.

She also enlists the help of her niece, Lucy. But to Scarpetta’s surprise, tracking the slippery Tailend Charlie is nearly impossible, even for someone as brilliant as her niece. Also, Lucy can’t explain how this anonymous nemesis could have access to private information. To make matters worse, a venomous media is whipping the public into a frenzy, questioning the seasoned forensics chief’s judgment and ""a quack cause of death on a par with spontaneous combustion.""

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Nov 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9780062436757

Patricia Cornwell

Patricia Cornwell is recognized as one of the world’s top bestselling crime authors with novels translated into thirty-six languages in more than 120 countries. Her novels have won numerous prestigious awards including the Edgar, the Creasey, the Anthony, the Macavity, and the Prix du Roman d’Aventure. Beyond the Scarpetta series, Patricia has written a definitive book about Jack the Ripper, a biography, and three more fiction series among others. Cornwell, a licensed helicopter pilot and scuba diver, actively researches the forensic technologies that inform her work. She was born in Miami, grew up in Montreat, North Carolina, and now lives and works in Boston. 

Reviews for Chaos

[andy_dimartino · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Somewhat disappointed again.

[catherineburkehines · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I never learn. At 17%, nothing has happened. Nothing. And not in an interesting way, either. How was this even published? A waste.

ETA: At 80% complete, the elapsed time within the book was about three hours, and the exposition felt endless. Endless. At 90% complete, all hell broke loose, and the villains were identified and disposed of within a couple of paragraphs. I just don't get it.

[dickmanikowski · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I find myself in an ambivalent relationship with Ms Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta suspense novels. This one tended more toward the hate end of the spectrum. "Why am I still reading this book that isn't going anywhere,' I asked myself as I kept turning the pages.

[buffalogr · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

The latest Scarpetta novel, ti's about a murder of a bicycle rider in Boston, then it spins out of control. This is chaotic, indeed, and needs some serious work to turn it into anything near an exciting read. There’s very little plot and lots of rambling so that we don’t have a dead body till 20% through the book. There's al awful lot of discussion about slimey shoes, internal monologue and other clothing concerns that detract from the whodunit plot.

[sydneyspaniel · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

The author took forever to get to the story and continually went off on tangents that had no bearing on the story, character development or anything besides being boring

[nbmars · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is the 24th book in the crime fiction series featuring forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta, who now is the head of the Cambridge Forensic Center in Massachusetts.

As the story opens on a suffocatingly hot day in early September, Kay and Police Investigator Pete Marino are called to the scene after 23-year-old cyclist Elisa Vandersteel is found dead in John F. Kennedy Park. Marino got a call about the case allegedly from Interpol, although it’s glaringly and annoyingly obvious to everyone but Marino and even Kay for a while that it was a fake call.

Kay has gotten her share of prank calls lately as well. These threatening calls come from someone identifying himself as “Tailend Charlie.” The voice on the calls has been manufactured to sound like Kay’s deceased father, and the messages are delivered in Italian, always at 6:12, which is Kay’s date of birth. Moreover, they always last 22.4 seconds; 224 was the street address where Kay grew up.

Kay and Marino discuss the current death, the calls by Tailend Charlie, and the upcoming visit of Kay’s sister Dorothy in confusing and chaotic dialogue, although this is probably not the “chaos” to which the title refers. When Kay’s FBI husband Benton Wesley enters the picture, the dialogue does not become more comprehensible. Clarity is not the strong point of this book.

As Kay and Marino analyze the crime scene, they discover that Vandersteel was a victim of some sort of electrocution, in a way similar to other recent puzzling deaths. In spite of some badly done red herrings, Kay, Marino, and Benton - for inexplicable reasons - suspect involvement of the pathological Carrie Grethen, nemesis of Kay and her niece Lucy.

The story builds to a predictable climax, and ends with a surprising revelation that ensures the storyline will continue in future books.

Evaluation: The plot is a bit silly and the dialogue is hopelessly garbled. Except for the interesting forensic details, the book was a great disappointment to me.