Customer Reviews

Black Notice

5 star:		(127)
4 star:		(123)
3 star:		(126)
2 star:		(101)
1 star:		(162)

 

 

A cargo ship containing the remains of a stowaway arrives in Virginia's waterway. Kay Scarpetta is called to examine the remains. Why would this man hide in a shipping container, and what does the strange tattoo on his back symbolize? These questions, as well as the identity of the man are a mystery to Scarpetta.

Kay's neice, Lucy, has a new lover, Jo. Lucy and Jo are working in Miami, and their latest mission has gone terribly wrong, leaving two criminals dead, and Jo, fighting for her life in the hospital.

Another body is found, this time, a young woman, brutally attacked, with strange bite marks on her body.

Kay and Marino, end up in France, working with Interpol on the cases of victims who have also been brutally attacked, with strange bite marks left on the bodies. Once there, the two will have to solve the bizzare puzzle of the strange killings, and make connection to the mystery man in the container.

"Black Notice" is one of the better entries in the Scarpetta series (it takes a while to get steam, about 250 pages before things start to move, and the plot involving the wolf-like killings comes into play). Long time readers of the series will notice each new novel is taking the series in a new direction; with less time being spent on the thrill a minute plot twists, and more time being spent on various sub-plots, and character development.

Patricia Cornwell is the leading practicioner of the forensic crime thriller, but over the years she has lost her knack of creating "up all night" reads, she is trying to balance too much in each novel, and at times it takes away from the main theme of the book. The story line is interesting in this new book, and the characters are all likable, but we want more page-turning plot twists.

If you are a fan of the series, you will enjoy this book, new readers should start off with one of her earlier novels, such as "All That Remains", "Cruel And Unusual", "The Body Farm", etc.

Nick Gonnella

Once again I am drawn in to Kay Scarpetta's world by the fascinating details of forensic science. But with with each novel I am finding the chief character increasingly annoying, self-centered and and one-dimensional. When the story strays from the police procedural stuff I find myself wading through the worst kind of melodrama involving Kay, her murdered lover and everyone surrounding her. I mean, can anyone read the dialogue between Dr. Scarpetta and Talley (at the Paris restaurant) without gagging or giggling. The whole issue of how Kay faces adversity is treated by the author without the slightest hint of (intentional) humor or irony. The book is extremely joyless. How could someone with no coping mechanisms stand to be a medical examiner at all?

Tne major flaw of the book, and one that occurs in several of Cornwell's novels, is that the eventual capture of the serial killer has very little to do with the following of forensic clues to expose the criminal. Rather, once again, the villain is undone by his obsessive need to go after the Chief Medical Examiner herself, and is defeated in hand to hand combat by our heroine. Won't these guys ever learn?

I was starting to feel that the Kay Scarpetta series was getting a little tired. But, my roommate bought Black Notice, and I decided to go ahead and read it. On the whole, it is a fairly good book. The strange victim with a strange tattoo found with strange hairs starts the book off. The primary plot revolves around this death, and becomes a little too fantastic (Who's Afraid of Virginia's Wolf?) . However, the book is saved by having a subplot involving what appears to be a new nemesis for Dr. Scarpetta: a strong woman Deputy Police Chief, attempting to shake up the department and Marino, Kay's close police friend, and Scarpetta herself. Ultimately, these two seemingly divergent plots must come together.

I have read all the books in this series, yet I will not profess to understanding all the complex personalaties and relationships in the primary characters. Therefore, if you are thinking of delving into this series, try the earlier books first.

The secondary plot, which almost becomes primary, and solid writing help make up for an odd story and a weak ending. Furthermore, Patricia Cornwell attempts to throw some things in the mix to keep interest, such as the question of "Is Benton really dead?".

My suggestion: Read the book and enjoy, but don't analyze it.

I just finished reading Black Notice and am so upset with Cornwell that I had to sit down here and write out my review to exorcise my negative thoughts as quickly as possible.

First of all, I really am enjoying reading Cornwell's series. I think that she very well might have the best mystery/thriller series out there today. If you have yet to pick up one of her books I would implore you to do so without hesitation. You should start towards the beginning of this series and follow the development of the characters even though it is not essential to enjoy yourself here. The quality of Cornwell's writing is so high that it will more than suffice in winning you over.

I'd been feeling that Cornwell had drawn herself into a corner with her series up to this book. She has been having an on-going involvement with a serial killer team that dragged across so many books that it was becoming a little tiresome. So when I started this book, I found myself filled with an unexpected excitement as Cornwell seemingly instigated a new level to her story composition with the introduction of great internal strife with in the medical examiners offices. When you read these pages, I promise you that you will find yourself riveted to the story as it unfolds.

I am so mad because this book clicked along perfectly for a good 70% of its first pages, then it stumbled a little and got a little hokey as Scarpetta and Marino traveled to Paris. But it still remained a very fine book. But the ending... my god Cornwell, how can you take such a fine achievement and desecrate it in such a predictable and uninspired manner? I won't give the ending away here. If you have read Cornwell in the past you will see exactly why this ending is so lazy on her part. Compare it to other endings Cornwell has given to us in the past and then tell me that it is not becoming a very tired gimmick on the author's part.

So all of that aside, I would love to give this book the five stars it should deserve.

A new Scarpetta title by Patricia Cornwell never fails to get my pulse humming. I dove into Black Notice confident that I would be adding it to my collection of all the other previous Scarpetta books in the series. Having finished it, I am deflated. Although it held my interest in the early chapters, with Cornwell's as-usual meticulous attention to forensic detail, the story falters mid-way and never seems to get back on track. This installment suffers noticably from the absence of Benton Westley, who was a calming, stabilizing eye for the hurricane of relentless activity that is Dr. Kay. I have not forgiven Cornwell yet for her lapse in judgement in killing him off, and am hoping against hope that she may find a way to resurrect him in the next book. Black Notice also suffers from an overly-ambitious scope, as Kay and Marino find themselves, incongruously, in Paris, chasing a serial killer for Interpol. Oh, yes--the killer. The resolution in this book is by far the weakest yet. After creating the most, uh, UNIQUE, perpetrator of crime since the maple-syrup guy in Postmortem--remember him?--Cornwell devotes exactly one page, the next-to-last, to his appearance and capture. After building the reader up for hundreds of pages, she leads us to expect a spectacular confrontation with the monster--and lets it drop with all the drama of soggy macaroni. It's as if, mid-chapter, she got tired and decided to quit right there. As a multiple-award winning author, she should know better. Her editors should know better. The reader expects, and deserves, a more satisfying payoff than the one she delivers in this book. We have also come to expect a more pscychologically complex villian than the one she delivers here. Scarpetta's nemesis, Diane Bray, is only a secondary character, but she is a much more interesting brand of evil than the one whodunit in this story. Temple Gault he most certainly is not, nor Carrie Grethen, either. One could almost deem him a childish creation, the cop-out of a tired author hell-bent on getting her 10th installment out. He might have retained our interest and even our sympathy if he had been given more humanity. As it is, he is as crudely sketched as a cartoon.

I would hold up any other book in the Scarpetta series as ample proof that Cornwell deserves all those awards she's received. However, "Black Notice" falls far short of the high mark she has previously set for herself, and we have come to expect. Dr. Kay is truly a unique creation, and a role model to aspire to, but she deserves better than this. Maybe it's time for her, and Cornwell to retire and go on to more wholesome pursuits.

I liked a lot the two or three first books of Patricia Cornwell with this unusual new character, Kay Scarpetta. Pete Marino and Lucy were also well described second roles and the serial killers involved in the stories very disturbing. I was then pretty sure that Patricia Cornwell would become one of the major crime stories writers of the years to come. But with books and years passing by, I realized that I was wrong : Patricia Cornwell is a one-and-only idea writer. And the soup, more and more salted, isn't digestible anymore.

So, like in the precedent Cornwell books, we have in BLACK NOTICE a serial killer on the loose, Lucy with a new girl-friend, rain and snow in Virginia ( is there such a season as spring downthere anyway ? ), a bad guy among Scarpetta employees ( this is not a spoiler, it is a recurrent theme in Cornwell's books ), pizzas and soups cooked by Kay, a deficient alarm system, Mercedes, three showers a day for Kay, a computer related subplot and a lot of scientific terms in order to remind us that Scarpetta is a doctor after all.

So, if you are interested in discovering what is all the fuss about Patricia Cornwell, I strongly suggest that you read her first books and leave this one for later if you are still curious.

A book zone the Return of the Son of the Mummy.

It's December in Richmond when a cargo ship is found to have the decomposing body of a stowaway on board, in a locked container. Chief Medical Examiner, Kay Scarpetta is called to the scene and personally conducts the autopsy finding a strange tatoo and blond animal-like hairs covering the body. A few days later, the same peculiar hair is found on a murdered store clerk. So begins Black Notice, Ms Cornwell's tenth Scarpetta mystery/thriller. This time, Kay follows the clues from Richmond to Interpol headquarters, Paris and back home again, to solve the case, in the deaths of these two unrelated people. But that's not all...she's having a personal crisis over the death of her lover, Benton Wesley, her niece Lucy is having all kinds of personal and work related problems and a new deputy chief is wreaking havoc with Kay's professional life. Patricia Cornwell has written a novel chock full of sometimes confusing story lines that finally come together for an unfortunately weak and predictable ending. The writing is tense and at times very compelling, but the story often gets bogged down in detail and seems more far-fetched than realistic or riveting. And her characters have become one dimensional, difficult to care about and uninteresting. All in all, not one of Ms Cornwell's best efforts. If you are new to this series, start with her terrific earlier books, Postmortem or Body of Evidence. If you're a Kay Scarpetta fan, do yourself a favor and skip this one.

Over the years, Dr. Scarpetta has become increasingly morose, and her 'glass half empty' life is becoming tedious to read about. Ms. Cornwell certainly puts her through alot, as well as Marino and Lucy.

The mystery itself was intriguing, but the office shenanigans were over the top, and instead of getting lost in her books, as I usually do, I found myself speeding through just to see how it ended. Kind of like inhaling a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, instead of slowly savoring a juicy steak. I think Kay needs to go see her shrink, or maybe just eat some Cheerios.

There are too many real people who live victorious lives in spite of incredible difficulty in the real world, which makes it hard to feel empathy or sympathy for the depressing Scarpetta. Get it together Kay- we love ya!

I think it is safe to say that Patricia Cornwell has, in her most recent books, gone far astray from the excitement and originality that were exhibited in her first few Kate Scarpetta novels. In Black Notice she 'treats' us to a basically unbelievable story full of subplots about office politics and her niece's bad attitude that simply detracts from any ongoing narrative thrust. Cornwell long ago went over the top with the seriel killer theme, the neurotic Dr. Scarpetta theme, the lesbian niece theme, and the decline of Morino theme. Readers are wanting, I think, to see some new sense of life in Scarpetta and a fresh direction, but in this book we get bleak, neurotic, angry characters doing equally bleak, neurotic and angry things to one another. No fun.

And, isn't the gimmic of making the FBI the bad guys and ATF the good guys a bit much? Given the publicity that has attended Cornwell's real life problems with the FBI, I believe readers would rather not see her carry the feud into her fiction. It cheapens it and just adds another dimension of heaviness the reader doesn't need to deal with.

If I were Scarpetta's boss, I would insist she take a sabbatical and seek help. Since a tug of war over her position has been a theme in more than one of Cornwell's Scarpetta books, it ill behooves her to present her heroine so scattered, irrational, and on the edge.

Maybe Cornwell should take a sabbatical from Scarpetta.

While I finished this book at midnight, after only two nights, I'm not sure it's one of her better ones. The wolf theme is creepy, I'll give it that, but the interpolice agency intrigue and someone trying to sabotage Scarpetta at work (someone posing as her on email, etc) are old themes that are a bit tired.

I'm not sure how Lucy and Jo got together. I must be forgetting the previous book.

It's typical Cornwell, though the forensic work is not as thorough or as interesting.

I supposed it's a must for followers of the series. I concur to start with previous ones, but I'd suggest Postmortem or All that Remains. Then work into my favorite, From Potters' Field (not sure if I got the title right...)