Patricia Cornwell: Trace

By MICHELE HEWITSON

In Kay Scarpetta, Cornwell created a character who has since had many imitators. We have come to know the type: She is a medical examiner, a tough woman in a man's world who will have trouble with men both

professionally and in her love life.

Scarpetta knows what people think of her. In Trace, Cornwell has her ponder what people say: "... she is

morbid. She is peculiar ... and can't get along with living people. Forensic pathologists are antisocial and odd and cold-blooded and utterly lacking in compassion."

Perhaps we have had too many of these characters. Scarpetta has become a cliche. And, perhaps worse, she has become the character Cornwell has her describe.

In Trace, Scarpetta is called back to Richmond, Virginia, to her former patch, a patch she was fired from some books ago. She returns with her side-kick (the comic relief), fat-cop-turned thin-former-cop Marino. They arrive in Virginia in time to see their former workplace being demolished, which is undoubtedly a clumsy sort

of metaphor because Scarpetta returns to find that the current medical examiner intends to demolish what is left of Scarpetta's reputation.

He's jealous, of course. All men are jealous of Scarpetta, apparently, because she's so good at her job. You begin to think that, if she were a real person, it might be that she's simply unlikeable: morbid, cold-blooded and so on.

Anyway, Scarpetta and Marino set out to solve the

suspicious death of a young girl and along the way

Marino gets drunk and gets involved in some seriously sick sex games with the girl's bereaved mother. Meanwhile (ho hum), Scarpetta's wayward, and quite possibly mad, lesbian niece Lucy is in trouble with a psycho stalker who will turn out to be connected to the death of the young girl.

There is a character in this book called Edgar Allan Pogue. He is a minor character from Scarpetta's days in Virginia. This is meant to be a scary book. A seriously scary book. With a character with a name like that it's impossible to take it seriously. This is supposed to be quirky and funny but it's just tiresome.

As if bringing back Scarpetta's long-lost lover was not bad enough; this is the sort of trick of plot writers of telly soaps resort to when the ratings drop. Cornwell seems to have seriously lost the plot. Scarpetta's a bore. Kill her off or send her to a home for retired medical examiners.