Make the madness stop

Granted, I’m probably not helping by linking to every bloody review of the book I can find, but come on. Is there really that much sense in giving Patricia Cornwell so much space in the newspaper when all you’re doing, year after year, is repeating the same thing over and over again?

The latest culprit: Clea Simon of the Boston Globe:

Because of the plot structure of “Trace,” it’s almost possible to turn a blind eye to the thoughtless acceptance of deadly force. The killer, whom we meet early on, is nearly inhuman — disgusting as well as cruel. A sickly, overweight child-murderer with a fetish for the dead, he’s beyond the reach of our sympathy. Because we trace his steps in the same kind of self-consciously flat prose that describes Scarpetta’s actions, he comes to seem reptilian, whereas she and the other “good guys” are merely obsessive and a bit cold.

We are given a rudimentary background for the killer — a sort of Psych 101 of the traumas that shaped him — but the rest of the narrative makes it hard to engage with him, to see him as other than the “beast” that his hunters call him. When the interaction that caused him to focus on Scarpetta and Lucy is finally revealed, it’s anticlimactic.

Plus, between the flat prose and the murderer’s lack of humanity, his crimes are not experienced as real or truly terrible. Although he’s the murderer, his acts are too flat or too distant to evoke much horror. Instead, it’s Lucy who flies into a killing rage in the line of duty, Marino who worries that he may have raped someone while drunk, Scarpetta whose increasingly flat affect appears to hide a deep depression, at least up until the denouement. So who’s the real villain here, making everybody suffer? Patricia Cornwell.

Aii right, all right, we get it. Her books suck. Can we move on now?