Kultur: (About) 100 Words on... Patricia Cornwell's "Book of the Dead"

Kultur: Songs, Scenes and Sunday School

A Blog on Culture by C. Michael Bailey

Kultur

Kultur is a Webblog primarily devoted to the discussion of music but often addressing movies, books, politics, religion, media and popular culture.

This blog offers me the opportunity to develop ideas and receive feedback in an effort to understand why King Solomon states in Ecclesiastes 1:17 (KJV):

Then I applied myself to the understanding of wisdom, and also of madness and folly, but I learned that this, too, is a chasing after the wind.

When not writing this blog, I serve as a Senior Reviewer for the online magazine All About Jazz. This blog is an outgrowth of and will eventually replace my previous blog: Kultur.

Kultur: (About) 100 Words on... Patricia Cornwell's "Book of the Dead"

(About) 100 Words on... Patricia Cornwell's "Book of the Dead"

Book of the Dead

Patricia Cornwell

Berkley, 2007

In Blowfly (Putnam, 2003), Patricia Cornwell switched from the Kay Scarpetta-First Person point of view to a third-person omniscient narrator. The result, through Trace (Putnam, 2004), Preditor (Putnam, 2005), and culminating disasterously in Book of the Dead, is to reduce her quartet of protagonists, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, Dr. Benton Wesley, Lucy Farinelli, and Pete Marino into snivelling, spoiled characatures of their previous selves not fit for an episode of Power, Privilege and Justice. From Scarpetta' perception, these characters are all fallible human beeing deserving our concern. Cornwell's third person perception is unforgivingly sterile and black and white, even of Scarpetta. The plot is beside the point save for the nuclear detonation that occurs among the series' protagonists. Cornwell attempts a redemptive psychobio in Scarpetta (Putnam, 2008) that largely fails to restore the characters to any level where we might give a damn about them. Pete Marino should have sledded the asphalt long ago.