Predator: Scarpetta (Book 14) (Kay Scarpetta)

Patricia Cornwell knows how to spin a good tale. i love her characters and feel as if i have gotten to know them and see them evolve (with all their humanness) over time. her writing is tight and the plot moves along and holds my interest. She can set a mood and make a scene so real- and one almost feels as if they are experiencing the scene in person.

All of Patricia Cornwell Books are for great reading. There isn’t one book I’ve come across that wasn’t great. I’m a Crime Scene Investigator and these books are great for individuals that maybe one day would get into Crime Scene Analysis. You can’t go wrong with a Patricia Cornwell Book. Thanks A Million!

This was a complex story with many twists and turns. A gruesome killer that I was glad when they found him out. Patiricia sure does write good stories that keep you captivated.
Am onto book 15 as the story continues.

Gets you hooked.

Predator-Patricia Cornwell

I ordered this book but found that pages 23-53 were missing and that the book duplicated 391-421 which were substituted in their place. A real disappointment since I was into the story at that point.

I purchased this kindle book after receiving an email from the store saying it was Patricia Cornwell's new book and released in 2012. However - it is not. Was released in 2005 or 2006. Hope I get a full refund and can prevent others from purchasing in error.Predator (Scarpetta)

This was sold as a new novel by Patricia Cornwell and it most certainly is not. It is in fact a re-release of a novel with no real addition to the original and for that reason I have given it 1 star. The plot is typical Scarpetta but a bit strained and certainly not one of her best. Had I realized that it was a re-release I would not have purchased it.

Any Cornwell work is better than some other books, but...

I have NEVER liked the way Marino has been handled in the entire series - now he is like a caricature- before he was street wise liasion to Scarpetta, then he blew up to a large smoking drinking person who had health problems, and now he is aloof big muscle bound biker guy who is at odds with Scarpetta and knows something funny is going on with the misinformation -

The series and this novel does not have the BITE it did - if you would reread the first books that made a wave in the thriller genre you will understand what I mean.

We've gone through a lot with the regulars of this series - they have not progressed in the way the folks who pay hardback prices would like. Not so sure I will pay hardback prices again for this series again. and that's sad.

I had read most of the reviews here before tackling Predator. It was given to me as a gift so Ireally had no choice but to read it. Now, I can tell you that the reviewers were right; don't waste your time. This is no longer Patricia Cornwell writing...at least it's not the old Patricia Cornwell I was devoted to. I don't know what's happened in her last several books, but other than those that might be given to me, I won't waste time or money on another Cornwell novel. This was the worst one yet. I did try a book that was suggested by someone writing a review on Predator. The book is called Thirst and the person knew what they were talking about. It is a gripping book that I read in two nights...didn't want to put it down once I started it, ans it didn't disappoint. The only way to describe the ending is to say, "wow."

I was once a great fan of Cornwell, especially the Scarpetta novels. But she has lost her writing ability. I saw her on "Fox and Friends" this morning and she didn't even know what she had written. She tried to get viewers to think that she had probed the psychopathic mind of killers. But she only gave us page after page of the techniques of brain scans without ever explaining what was found by these tests or what caused the warped minds of these aberrational humans. And she also said on the news that her book was so scary that it bothered her to think that she could imagine these things. There was nothing scary about her book and her brief episodes of fear in the captive and ponderings by the psychopath could have been adapted directly from "Silence of the Lambs." Her writing is weak and pointless. Why did she spend so many pages writing about citrus canker in Florida when the only place this took the reader was to explain that the copper used in pesticides can give a false positive when luminol is used to check for blood. She gave us 300 pages of PAP and then tried to give us a deneoument and climax in ten pages. The incident where the subject of Benton Wesley's testing captures Scarpetta was sadly a shadow of what we used to expect from her. After she is captured with a ligature made in his cell, we learn on the next page that she has escaped and is present to help chase down the psychopathic killer. It is clear over several of her last books that she can't write a finish. It seems that she writes a bunch of nonsense until she is up against a deadline and then just wraps it up in a nonsensical way so it can go to the publisher. One should have known after the pitiful "Isle of Dogs" that there was no hope left and I have finaly come to that point. Don't waste your time. One star is one too many!

I was terribly disappointed by Patricia Cornwell's latest book, Predator. I have been a big fan of the previous novels, but this one made me wonder if Cornwell hired a ghost writer. Without spoiling the plot, for those I can't dissuade from wasting their time reading this, there are plot lines that seem to be very important that peter out without any further mention, or resolution. Pete Marino, a character I have always liked, that seemed street-wise, if predjudiced, comes off as a brutish bufoon, and hints are given as to the nature of his moodiness, but again, no resolution. Her attempts to give us the criminal's point of view come off as silly and repetitive, and I guess I now have a very good idea what an MRI machine sounds like, but have no idea why it was so important.

My advice: if you love Kay Scarpetta, Benton Wesley, Pete Marino, et al, let them rest in peace in your memories, but let them go. They're dead now.

This review is for the abridged audiobook version of Predator.

My wife and I listened to this dreadful book on the first leg of our journey from New York to Florida in January 2014 and it served us well in that it provided a sensory experience worse than that flooding in through our eyeballs as we threaded the Staten Island/New Jersey Roadworks section of the trip.

The reader did a good job, but she was limited with what she had to work with - which was utter rubbish.

Cornwell has a tendency to veer out of the story so she can deliver an infodump on this or that piece of technology, and in this novel it is the prime storytelling style. No sooner are you hooked on some tense piece of the drama unfolding than it's off for a discussion of this spectrometer or that bit of Florida legislation minutiae.

The plot centers around a kidnapping but veers off into Lucyland every now and then. I stopped reading Cornwell's books after that one with the contrived bolt-on Libyan Terrorist ending so I missed the part where Lucy became rich as Croesus. I probably wouldn't have believed it anyway. Something Horrible lies in Lucy's past, but I would rather gouge out my ears than risk the audiobook version of whatever it was.

To cut a long story short - as indeed this abridged recording does - the tale wended its way towards a conclusion neither my wife nor I could get excited about by the time it was done. I didn't see the ending coming even though it had been strongly telegraphed all along, but that was because I had ceased to care hours ago and just wished for some more Libyan Terrorists to burst in and shoot everyone.

When it was over we had a discussion over whether the story was abridged because of a publishing decision or because the reader got as sick of the whole thing as we had and just skipped ahead so it would be over.

A waste of time. Don't bother if you could usefully be doing something else.

I love the Kay Scarpetta character, and I have read a good number of Patricia Cornwell's books. But I wish she would tone down the violence of her villains. We are surrounded by so much violence in the real world. We do not need villains as evil and sociopathic as those which appear in the Scarpetta books. Her other characters are interesting enough to carry the book without the degree of violence that the author puts into her villains. The books would be better and actually much more realistic if the author would tone them down a bit.

I was hoping that once Patricia Cornwell got past the whole Werewolf storyline, she would regroup and get the Scarpetta series back on track, but sadly it's not to be. Like 'Blow Fly' and 'Trace' before it, 'Predator' is a confusing and badly-written mess of a novel, in which the characters do nothing but angst and the plot jumps all over the place. I really don't know what is going on with Cornwell these days; having "rebooted" Scarpetta with `The Last Precinct', she seems to have had no idea what to do next. The series is just drifting along aimlessly, with increasingly overblown storylines and one-dimensional characters.

It's a pity, because the basic plot outline of `Predator', involving multiple cases that may or may not be connected, has worked well for Cornwell before. And a better, or more interested, writer would probably have been able to pull this together really well. But as with Cornwell's last few books, the storyline is needlessly convoluted and the pacing of the book is terrible. The third-person narration is a major problem for Cornwell; she introduces too many different perspectives and sub-plots, and jumps around between them too frequently. In addition, she spends far too much time exploring how psychologically messed-up all the characters are and not enough time on the actual investigation.

So once again, this is a long book in which not much actually happens. Cornwell seems content to just let the story wander around without direction, before jamming the ending into the last twenty pages in very forced and unconvincing fashion. Think about it, that conclusion had the potential to be a really clever twist, an unexpected but plausible way to tie all the story threads together and explain some of the baffling connections between the different cases. But the way in which Cornwell breathlessly shoves it all together make it seem like nothing more than a cheap cop-out.......("oh by the way, this explains everything. The End").

And what is going on with the characters? Where they once had enough flaws and bad habits to make them seem human, they now spend literally all their time being petty, snarky, jealous, and secretive. Marino hates Scarpetta. Scarpetta hates Benton. Lucy hates herself. Everyone else either worships Scarpetta or is determined to do her in. It seems nobody can even hold a civil conversation with each other anymore, and you wonder why they all can't get together over one of Kay's delicious Italian meals and sort their issues out. Again, I think the third-person narration is part of the problem here. With Kay narrating, we experienced all her emotions and thoughts, and formed detailed impressions of other characters through her eyes. Writing in the third-person and present tense, Cornwell's style is dry and wooden ("Marino is angry....Scarpetta feels annoyed.....Benton sounds tired"), making the characters feel flat and colourless.

So unfortunately `Predator' is no improvement over `Blow Fly' and `Trace', and in fact it repeats all the negatives of those two books. Bad writing, roundabout story, unlikeable characters, a rushed ending that leaves plot points hanging. That plot device at the end WAS quite clever...if only Cornwell had written a proper story and characters to go with it.

As a physician, I have long enjoyed Kay Scarpetta's very clever and on-target forensic deductions. This time around, Kay seems more troubled by interpersonal relations than driven by hard science -- a fact not glossed over at all by slinging grandly overbearing terminology at the reader [not just a scanning electron microscope, but an SEM with aperture control yet, etc -- big deal]. Moreover, she now comes across as a lousy manager of a grant-supported institution, unable to come to grips with hard personnel facts.

For her doctors at the "world's best neuro-psych hospital" to let Lucy run loose with a pituitary tumor for over a year comes as close to malpractice as you can get. That tumor presses on the optic nerve junction, causing severe visual deficits -- surely a mighty good reason to revoke her pilot's license, not to mention a weapon's permit. For Lucy to fly a helicopter over populated southern Florida, or to score 100% hits at moving targets while riding a motor bike at 140 mph stretches credulity; how the dickens could Scarpetta condone that? The medical review team certainly should have caught that one. Worse yet, how could the CEO of an exclusive computer consulting business leave her (unencrypted) password lying around; not change the master keyword at regular intervals; and be unaware, a full year after the fact, that her secure system has been hacked?? The author better get some help here - and mighty quick too.

Seems as if Caldwell is just grinding out formula books to meet her publisher's quota -- mixing in far too many rather tedious personality conflicts to make this a credible thriller. And then that macabre cover photo of the author with a human skeleton next to her formal living room's fireplace -- tasteless, and altogether inappropriate. How did this book ever make the best-seller list?

"How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable/Seem to me all the uses of this world."

Shakespeare's Hamlet could have been talking about Predator, Patricia Cornwell's latest best-selling entry in the Kay Scarpetta mystery series.

The usual characters are back: forensic pathologist Dr. Kay Scarpetta; Lucy Farinelli, Scarpetta's niece; Pete Marino; and Dr. Benton Wesley, who has been miraculously resurrected from the dead.

The characters, however, are mere cardboard caricatures of their former selves. They are bitter and secretive, suffering pain and misery, filled with anger and resentment, and constantly sniping maliciously at one another. We no longer care what happens to them.

The plot is disjointed, contrived, and unconvincing. With just a few pages to go in this novel, we suspect that only a miracle will bring closure and accomplish a plot resolution. Alas, no such miracle occurs.

Cornwell's muddled tale, both confused and confusing, is set in Hollywood, Florida, where Scarpetta has an office at the National Forensic Academy, and in Boston, where Wesley is examining a compulsive murderer named Basil Jenrette. Jenrette is the subject of the researchers Prefrontal Determinants of Aggressive-Type Overt Responsibility study.

By agreeing to be a guinea pig in the PREDATOR project, Jenrette has been spared the death penalty. Even in prison, however, he knows much more than he should be able to know about current crimes.

The plot thickens, or becomes more opaque, when Scarpetta's testy sidekick, Pete Marino, who now looks like a parody of a biker thug, receives a call from a character named HOG ("Hand of God"), who is the de rigueur sociopath of the current tale.

Meanwhile, Scarpetta's gay niece, Lucy, is on a self-destructive course, picking up potentially dangerous lovers for one-night stands. She also has a deadly secret that threatens to alienate Scarpetta and Wesley. Hint: One of the book's key themes is gender confusion.

Hit this novel with a critical hammer and it flies to pieces. Scarpetta's patented autopsies are completely missing from Predator (thank God for small favors!); they are replaced with the technical jargon of DNA processing and other high-tech procedures that would baffle a Harvard professor.

Even more exasperating, at novel's end, is how Cornwell attempts without success to knit together the scattered pieces of this yarn into a coherent fabric. The novel ends abruptly, as if the author grew tired of writing such lackluster drivel.

If you want to experience Cornwell at her best, read her first novels: Postmortem, Body of Evidence, All That Remains, Cruel and Unusual, The Body Farm, and From Potter's Field.

If you insist on reading this one, I recommend that you go to your local library and check it out or at least wait for the paperback edition.

This books marks the sad disintegration of the once engaging kay Scarpetta series.

Scarpetta, now heading a Forensics Academy created by her troubled niece Lucy and staffed by former homicide detective Marino, is apparently investigating the apparent sucide of a doctor and the (apparently) unrelated disappearances of a family and a mother and daughter in Florida. Scarpetta's lover is conducting studies of diabolical killers in New England and his examination of one is somehow inexorably linked to the Scarpetta investigations. In the mean time, an obnoxious fellow is wreaking havoc upon the relationships at the academy. Lucy, who has apparently become a lesbian and is suffering from an operable brain tumor, has a bizarre sexual encounter with a mysterious women and it is all resolved in an unsatisfying manner in the last five pages.

None of the characters is even marginally likeable and the chapters are thrown together without any sense of continuity or suspense. Removing Scarpetta from the morgue was a big mistake and marked the downfall of this series. The ridiculous Lucy the Super Spy antics are as annoying as they are ridiculous. Marino has devolved into a moronic,boorish, Neanderthal. The characters, once intelligent and realistic, behave so stupidly in this novel it confounds belief. The post mortum on this novel suggests that the author has lost her passion for these characters. That being the case, she might consider laying them to rest...permanently.

In response to another reader....there is no smear campaign against Patricia Cornwell by me. I am an avid fan and have enjoyed previous books which other readers gave negative feedback on. However, with that said, I have to agree with the majority of the readers negative feedback of PREDATOR. I like thinking for myself, and looking for the answers within the story, yet with this latest book there seemed to have way too many holes with no answers. So many items/substories are just left hanging or have no reasoning on why they even began.

Another issue I had was with Marino's character. It was as if she changed or reinvested Mario without letting us know. He went from bitter washed-up cop, to a caricature bad ass biker dude? Huh? Where did this come from? For the past few books Lucy has been on a downward spiral self-destruct mode and it gets worse. Lucy now has a brain tumor but the way the story is given you have absolutely no regard or sympathy for her. You want to shake Lucy and say "#$%@, You have a benign tumor, get it taken care of and move on...Sheesh!". Kay has lost all zeal, zip, zest...whatever. She's hard, self absorbed, woe-is-me character with a personality of a spoon.

What did I like about this book? I like the premise of the story along with the characters Basil and Dr. Amos which were well written. You know from the get-go that Dr. Amos is the red herring (which she has at least 1 character in each book to get the readers to question the "who-done-it").

I'll continue to read Cornwell's future books, just very disappointed in this one.

Once there was a time when a new Patricia Cornwell book would send me instantly to the store and I would barely make it home before eagerly starting to read it. Such is no longer the case. After Benton was resurrected from the dead, I re-read the entire series and wasn't pleased with the direction Cornwell was taking with her characters. I continue to be displeased with this latest attempt. Somehow, Marino has de-evolved into first a drunkard and now an angry biker. Scarpetta, once a self-assured strong female, is now angst-driven and annoying. Cornwell no longer writes from the perspective of Kay Scarpetta but rather from a distant 3rd person perspective and in this novel tries to explore the mind of a psychotic. Scarpetta manages to correlate murders she is investigating with one of the subjects of Benton's study about the brain waves of psychotic killers. Meanwhile, a forensic doctor employed under Scarpetta undermines the team at every turn after stealing equipment from Lucy that allows him to monitor their every move; Lucy is seemingly unaware of this theft as she is overwhelmed with a recent medical problem that may prevent her from piloting any longer. Her doctor, by the way, is one of the murder victims. This is a disjointed effort at best. Cornwell has stated that she wanted to get into the mind of a killer with this novel; I for one hope she returns to getting into the mind of Kay Scarpetta!

Patricia Cornwell has a talent for creating books where the writing is taut, dark and moody. Her characters always seem bordering on despair, in spite of their collective law enforcement brilliance and professional successes. It's been a formula that has worked, generally, in the Kay Scarpetta series. Yet the recent books seem heavy-handed, and Predator is unfortunately no exception.

One problem is this book relies heavily on coincidence. In Predator, a medical-forensic experiment that Benton is working on in Boston happens to relate to a series of killings that Dr. Kay is working in Florida. And, guess what? Lucy could link the two. But something is wrong. There's a spy. There is illness. There is a blizzard. There is even a citrus disease that is forcing the destruction of much loved orange trees.

It all seems a bit too much to ask of a reader, all the coincidence layered with all the doom and gloom.

Generally, Cornwell is a wonderful story teller, and her characters seem real, if not exactly happy souls. At this point, the characters are all familiar, and it's always good to see what they're up to.

In Predator, Cornwell has invented gruesome crimes with interesting bad guys, and an arc that successfully spans the novel. Another reviewer mentioned the pink shoe. That is just one of many perfectly placed details and clues.

Yet it's not a book that merits more than a few stars. It's ultimately flawed by a sort of listlessness, a sense of ennui rather than urgency.

Kay Scarpetta is a wonderful heroine, and Cornwell is a terrific writer. I hope the next installment (and I do hope Cornwell writes another installment) in this series has more resolution, and perhaps a bit more excitement. A happy ending may not be in Scarpetta's future, but let's hope she can have at least one happy moment.

Reading this book made me question if I'm getting senile, even though up until now I think I'm fine. I kept asking myself if I missed something because the book jumped from character to character and scene to scene with what seemed to me no rhyme or reason. I was listening to it on CD so I couldn't go back and re-read the past few pages to see how (or if) things fell into continuity. Now that I've managed to finish it I see that they didn't. The multiple personality (that even involved a different sex) was a cheap way to end a book that I think even the author was bored silly with. I've concluded that I'm fine but I am still concerned that I was stupid enough to waste time reading to the end hoping at some point it would make sense. It never does.

It is just me are have these bitter, unhappy characters gotten more bitter and unhappy...I did not think it was possible quite frankly. Cornwell has Scarpetta, Marino, and Lucy, act surly toward everyone, I can only assume that Ms. Cornwell is not altogether happy and it has poisoned her characters. It's like they perpetually wake up on the wrong side of the morgue. As far as the book, well it's fair, the story has a nice pace and I found much of it interesting, though much of it seems implausable and the ending is abrupt, but I must say, as always, Ms. Cornwell does her homework when it comes to forensics. The book itself feels like, less of a thriller, more of a narrative of the main characters current lives, it's an odd read and I've read all of her Scarpetta books, it has some gory surprises I assure you, but the psychopath seems like a bit of an afterthought, though the final twist is a nice touch, but leaves a few holes so to speak. If you enjoy this series, you should read this book, if for no other reason than to find out about the main characters, but be forewarned that Cornwell has lost her mojo and this current book pales in comparison to her best work. Scarpetta has become so bitter and unlikeable and that is sad, as far as Marino, I always cringe when I think that he could be a caracature of someone Ms. Cornwell knew when she worked at the Virgina crime lab...now that's scary. Ms. Cornwell needs to lighten these charactures up, I realize they work in morgue, but they are not IN it.

Kay Scarpetta, Lucy, Marino, and Benton are back and as miserable as ever. Without any transition or explanation about what has passed since the last book, Lucy now owns a Forensic Academy where she employs Kay and Marino and where they teach others the tricks of their trade. Lucy is also upset about the death of a man we have never heard of before and it seems that somehow, because of him, she is sick. Kay and Benton's relationship is still on the rocks and they act as though it is a tedious chore to even try to make it work. Marino is miserable and depressed and not getting along at all with Kay. Haven't heard anything about a bad guy or a mystery yet? That's because the book centers almost completely around the foursome's pathetic lives with a mystery as a sidenote. The mystery isn't even very good and in the end is concluded in a very disappointing way.

Cornwell has completely lost her edge. It's not coming back. These books continue to get worse and worse. After being a huge fan of the series for so long it is sad for me to say goodbye, but buying these books is truly a waste of money. The characters continue to be miserable and not do anything to try to get better. The mysteries that the books used to be based around now play second fiddle to the characters pathetic interactions. The plot leaves many questions unanswered, but sadly, I don't really need them answered to leave this book behind.