Southern Cross - Patricia Cornwell

Patricia Cornwell is most well known for her crime thrillers featuring Dr. Kay Scarpetta. These medical thrillers, based around the investigations of the Chief Medical Examiner of Virginia, consistently shot her to the top of the best-sellers lists, won her numerous top awards including the Golden Dagger(crime fiction's top award) and guaranteed her a loyal readership. For reasons best known only to herself however, she has opted in recent years to turn her back upon the character which everyone loves and instead to embark upon a new, deeply disappointing series of supposedly 'satirical' novels with all new characters. Swift would turn in his grave at the ...  Read the complete review

I bought the book expecting to read an edge-of-your-seat thriller but instead got a rather surreal, David Lynch-ian type of story. The novel started out pretty much like your run-of-the-mill crime story - that is until the second chapter or so when I realized that this is some sort of a parody, with its odd motley bunch of characters. It took me a while to finish this book, which normally would have only lasted me a couple of all-nighters. The plot develops very slowly and we are often faced with the inevitable character conflicts at every turn of the page, but the satirical and offbeat humor on those same pages kept me glued to the novel. Thanks largely to ...  Read the complete review

The structure of this book switched from exagerrated satire to ordinary fiction back and forth in such a way that it made the believability of the world in which the characters operated difficult to believe. It didn't seem to conform to it's own rules. I really like Cornwall and was heartily dissapointed by this book. It's trying to be a mystery, a comedic satire, and a romance and all fail to gel. I have to say I'm very surprised, because Cornwall is a skilled writer. I want to support her trying other forms other than the forensic mystery, in which she has succeded in turning out excellent crime novels, often intensly gripping in their use of ...  Read the complete review