Predator - Patricia Cornwell

Scarpetta, now freelancing with the National Forensic Academy in Florida, digs into a case more bizarre than any she has ever faced, one that has produced not only unusual physical evidence, but also tantalizing clues about the inner workings of an extremely cunning and criminal mind. She and her team —Pete Marino, Benton Wesley, and her niece, Lucy—track the odd connections between several horrific crimes and the people who are the likely suspects. As one psychopath, safely behind bars and the subject of a classified scientific study at a Harvard-affiliated psychiatric hospital, teases Scarpetta with tips that could be fact—or fantasy—the number of killers on the loose seems to multiply.
Are these events related or merely random? And what can the study of one man's brain tell them about the methods of a psychopath still lurking in the shadows?

Although I’m still a follower of Cornwell’s Scarpetta series I must say I found her latest books a bit of a disappointment. However, every time one comes out I can’t resist buying it and see whether Kay Scarpetta will finally be allowed to have some peace or if there’s someone else who is going to hate.

When I started Predator, it seemed to me that everything was just the same as in previous books. Someone hates Kay so bad that they will even try to sabotage her life, Marino is still angry, bitter, and annoying to everyone else and Lucy still has many problems about who she is, where she is going and in this story she also has some health problems. I’m sad to say this but it seems all the main characters need a quick visit to the nearest psychiatric hospital or, in Kay’s case, her coworkers definitely do. It wouldn’t be bad in one book but it seems that it’s been happening in the last books and that one is just more of the same.

I don’t know why Benton and Kay spend so much time apart, I mean she did resurrect him why keep him away. Lucy is very rich, we already know that, and she is very intelligent too, would she notice that someone did something to her PDA. In addition, Marino was always obnoxious to women but he seemed to have improved somewhat in the past, why make him go back? I used to love these characters and now it seems I don’t even recognize them.

Plot wise the story was a bit confusing. There were Benton’s experiments with convicted killers, an investigation about a young woman found murdered and tattooed with the same designs that Lucy’s last conquest has in her body and then there is a family of two women and two children that have disappeared without a trace while somewhere else a woman is being slowly tortured in an empty house.

It’s difficult to juggle all the details in so many storylines and I was quite lost for a while. She does manage to bring things together in the end and those last chapters are the best part of story. Because of that and because I still have hopes that things get better my grade is slightly higher than what I thought of giving it at first.

Grade: 4/5