A car is discovered, abandoned.
Yet another young couple is missing, probably dead.
For Kay Scarpetta, chief medical examiner in Richmond, Va., a few vague clues and some co-workers who are more evasive than cooperative are, to borrow the title of the novel, ”All That Remains.”
As usual, Scarpetta, as one of the new fictional breed of female detectives, makes her way doggedly through the case. And the murderer is revealed by book`s-or in this case, audio`s-end.
What baffles me isn`t the particulars of the case, but how best-selling author Patricia D. Cornwell got such a hot reputation.
Audio companies are picking her books up faster than you can say ”Body of Evidence,” to borrow from another title both in print and on audio.
Reviewers have been effusive, if not eloquent, resorting to the standby praises, ”finely crafted” and ”rich in character.”
Another reviewer wrote that Cornwell ”makes the morgue come alive,” but I found it just barely stirring.
Scarpetta seems to have little sense of humor and no capacity for rumination. At least her sidekick, Lt. Marino, who calls a person`s home his
”crib” and speaks of murder victims as having been ”whacked,” has no pretensions.
Maybe it was the lackluster readers.
The Books on Tape version (10 1/2 hours; $9.95 rental, $56 sale;
800-626-3333) is read, inexplicably, by Donada Peters, who has a British accent. Scarpetta, who is the first-person narrator in the books, was raised in Miami, not Manchester. And Peters gives Marino, a New Jersey Italian, a Southern accent.
Brilliance uses two readers for its Cornwell titles. Sheila Hart narrates ”All That Remains” and Sandra Burr does ”Body of Evidence” (each 9 hours, $21.95 sale). Not that there was anything horrendously wrong with either reader. They just didn`t sing to me.
In fact, I can hardly tell them apart, although Burr has a tendency to sound a bit too much like a storybook lady. She`ll be talking about a murder victim and I`ll be wondering why she sounds like she`s smiling.
The best was actually Kate Burton, who reads an abridged version of ”All That Remains” for HarperCollins (3 hours, $16). She seemed to have been more simpatico with the material, and the abridgment wasn`t half bad, either.
At least, with Burton`s reading, I began to think of Scarpetta as a full- bodied person, not just a silhouette (or should I say shroud?). She seemed compassionate, intelligent and-hey!-”finely crafted.”
