Point of Origin

When your everyday life is filled with death it's easy to find yourself a little edgy. The audio version of Patricia Cornwell's Point of Origin gives fans of her familiar heroine, Dr Kay Scarpetta, a little something extra, a chance to hear the deep hurt and burning cynicism of the chief medical examiner's biting words. "You don't put your hands inside their ruined bodies and touch and measure their wounds .... You see clean case files and glossy photos and cold crime scenes. You spend more time with the killers than with those they ripped from life. And maybe you sleep better than I do, too. Maybe you still dream because you aren't afraid to."

Perhaps because Kate Reading has also narrated Cornwell's Unnatural Exposure and Cause of Death, her voice conveys experience and the history of what has come before, allowing listeners to hear between the lines. Using a subtle but effective range of vocal inflections, Reading lifts the characters off the page and carries them along as the plot spins ever faster, tangling Scarpetta in a snarl of arson, deceit and psychopathic murder. With her nemesis making threats and suspicious fires leaving calcified corpses, Dr. Scarpetta's long-overdue romantic getaway has gone up in smoke. It's just one more day at the morgue and Point of Origin, another hit in the popular series of Scarpetta mysteries, finds the good doctor's attitude honed to a razor sharp point.--George Laney

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A slow start leading to an amazing second half - Rated
'Point of Origin' is the ninth book in the Kay Scarpetta series written by Patricia Cornwell and begins when a fire burns down a farmhouse, killing a woman and a stable full of horses. Just after Kay travels to the scene to investigate the grisily deaths, she hears that her old nemesis Carrie Grethen, the psychopathic, evil partner of serial killer Temple Gault, has escaped from the maximum security insane asylum in New York where she has been held since her capture 5 years ago. With the investigation into the dead woman in the fire, as well as being in pursuit of Carrie, Kay is facing one of her toughest challenges yet and the bodies keep mounting up - including one that comes as a life-changing shock to Kay, but giving her even more motivation to catch the twisted killer.

The first 200 pages of this book are extremely slow and even becomes quite boring, but then Cornwell picks up her pace halfway through and finishes off this book as one of the best she has written yet. If you're familiar with the rest of the books in the Scarpetta series you'll find some massive shocks in this novel with some twists that throws the overall storyline of the series into a whirlwind of surprises and excitement that could set the next few novels in a completely new direction. The forensic detail is as acurate as always and the investigation really gets exciting once it gets going. Unfortunately the killer is fairly obvious (it pretty much tells you on the first page!) and the slow start may put some readers off, but my advice would be this - stick with it! Overall it does turn out to be one of the best in the series yet - easily up there with my favourites, Postmortem and From Potter's Field. Highly recommended to regular Cornwell readers but newcomers to the series should perhaps really read the earlier novels first to really appreciate this great book.

How devestatingly exciting! - Rated
I have just finished reading this book and after a slow start, I was yet again completely gripped by Cornwell's story. Silly as it may sound, I got into it so much I almost cried at the end. I am glad I don't read any spoilers so one of the main character's death came as a very unwanted suprise but that's what's good about most of her books - that something unexpected happens. I liked this book better than the first two but my favourites still are the Temple Gault ones.

Point of Origin - Rated
Looking at the other reviews posted here, it's pretty clear that opinions of this book fall into two distinctive categories. There are those who loved the book and welcome it into the series of Scarpetta detective novels, and those that are really disappointed with it and feel that Cornwell is either not developing her characters enough, or developing them in the wrong way. Which is why I'm going to sit very firmly on the fence!

In fact I wholeheartedly agree with the later group of critics, Scarpetta has developed into such a driven and exacting personality that she is almost becoming robotic in he attitudes to all walks of life. The fact that she is career minded or practical about most things I can accept, the fact that she is becoming demanding, belittling, downright rude and unfriendly to all she meets is a little harder to accept. If I were her assistant Fielding, I'll tell he where to stick her sharpest scalpel and look for a new job. This woman must be the biggest nightmare in the world to work for!

Niece Lucy just hasn't developed at all. Professionally she changes from book to book, learning a new skill as determined by whatever situation Cornwell wants to place her is. One moment she's single handily created the first virtual intelligence robot, next she's flying helicopters for the ATS! What next? Developing a cure for cancer? Breaking the world 100 metres record? And anyway how can such a needy, moaning and winging person be such a professional success? "Ohhh nobody likes me!" weeps the young, beautiful, talented Lucy! "Someone as gifted as Lucy is always going to be lonely" pities Auntie Scarpetta! Well welcome to the real world ladies, now shut up or put up!

My other major gripe with Cornwell is the pages and pages of detailed technical information as if to impress us. She's bombarded us with enough post-mortem facts to cheese off even the most dedicated fan so she turns to a different aspect, in this book's case, Fire Examination and gives us enough reams of procedural particulars to sink a ship. Boring!

But, there again, I also wholeheartedly agree with the fist section of fans. This is still a book I whipped through in a couple of sittings. It never lost my attention and I was hooked to find out what happened all the way to the end, and I have no doubts that in a couple of weeks I'll be picking up the next one in the series.

I can only hope that now with old woman Benton out of the way, (sorry Kay, but let's face it you weren't exactly cut up about the whole affair) we'll be treated to a new and interesting character! Long Live Marino, she's single again now Pete, go for it Sunshine!

A great read - Rated
I enjoyed this book tremendously. It was much better than it's predecessor in the series. I found it difficult at first to get used to the idea that Lucy was no longer an FBI agent, but was now working for ATF. However, as the book progressed it all started to fall into place. I thought this one was especially sad as well, however I get the feeling that Benton may not be gone for good.
Definately worth reading!

A book too far - Rated
I have read several other Kay Scarpetta novels by Patricia Cornwell. I started off thinking they were excellent, but they have worn a bit thin as I have read more. The bad sides of these books have taken over completely in this book. Maybe this series should have been laid to rest before it came to this.

The central character, Kay Scarpetta, has grown more irritating and has now become unbearable. A right clever-dick smart a**e who is just always right.

Kay's niece, Lucy has turned into a comic strip "super woman". This character could have been developed so much better. Instead she just turns the book into even more of a farce.

All of the books in this series meander off the main plot, and in the early days this added to their interest as characters and sub plots were developed. But in this book the main plot, which starts so well, fades into the background for a large part of the book. The level of insignificant detail just wastes the reader's time.

Maybe if 200 pages of waffle were removed this would be a readable book.

I did not get to the end of this book, which is very unusual for me (and I have read & enjoyed others in this series before). If the main plot was ever going to be revisited I would have forgotten where it was when last seen anyway.

I'm afraid Patricia Cornwell has just churned out "more of the same" with this book, but has not even made a good job of that.