Notes in the Margin

Grafton, Sue. “L” is for Lawless  (1995) 
Holt, 290 pages, $24.00 hardcover
ISBN  0-8050-1937-5

Many critics called “K” is for Killer Grafton’s darkest, most disturbing novel.  Grafton herself may have felt the same way, because  “L” is for Lawless seems to be a concerted attempt at humor.

The novel opens in comical circumstances:  Henry Pitts, Kinsey’s landlord, and his four siblings, whose ages range from Henry’s 85 to Charlie’s 93, are preparing for the wedding of older brother William to Rosie (age 70), owner of the neighborhood tavern.  “With William pushing eighty-eight, the phrase `until death do us part’ was statistically more significant for them than for most.”  The four Pitts brothers, collectively known as “the boys,” and sister Nell provide a humorous picture of long-term sibling rivalry.

Amidst the wedding preparations, Henry asks Kinsey—who’s scheduled to be a bridesmaid—if she’d mind helping out a neighborhood family having trouble collecting death benefits from the Veterans Administration.  It’s her involvement with this family that initiates the cross-country chase of the book’s mystery, but not before Kinsey has a chance to showcase her wit:

Somehow in my profession I seem to spend a lot of time in kitchens looking on while men make sandwiches, and I can state categorically, they do it better than women. Men are fearless. They have no interest in nutrition and seldom study the list of chemicals provided on the package. I’ve never seen a man cut the crusts off the bread or worry about the aesthetics of the “presentation.” Forget the sprig of parsley and the radish rosette. With men, it’s strictly a grunt-and-munch operation. (p. 36)

As a child I was raised with the same kind of white bread . . . you could roll it into little pellets and flick them across the table at your aunt when she wasn’t looking. If one of these bread boogers landed in her hair, she would slap at it, irritated, thinking it was a fly. (pp. 36-37)

Another lighter touch in this novel is that the mystery doesn’t involve a murder, although Kinsey ends up in some dangerous situations during her Bonnie-and-Clyde trip across country. The humor does diminish about midway through the book when the chase’s high stakes become obvious.  Nonetheless, Kinsey manages to keep her wits—and her wit—about her:

Now you see? This is the beauty of keeping up those skills. In a crisis situation, I had only to open my mouth and a fib flopped out. An unpracticed liar can’t always rise to the occasion like I can. (p. 110)

During her escapades Kinsey has time to think about family—her own, the Pitts’s, the father-daughter-grandmother trio she ends up with in Louisville.  Like ancient comedies, the novel ends with the marriage of William and Rosie, and with Kinsey reunited with the family she belongs with.

© 1997 by Mary Daniels Brown

Grafton, Sue. “K” is for Killer  (1994)
Holt, 285 pages, $22.95 hardcover
ISBN  0-8050-1936-7

Janice Kepler is having trouble coping with her daughter’s death.  She’s joined a support group but finds it little comfort.  One night she leaves the group meeting early and sees a light on in the office of Millhone Investigations. Janice explains to Kinsey Millhone that police have uncovered no motive and no leads in the case since her daughter’s badly decomposed body was found ten months earlier:  “Whoever did this, I want him punished.  I want this laid to rest . . . I’m sick and tired of talk. It gets nowhere.”

So Kinsey begins her investigation into the death—and life—of the beautiful, headstrong, selfish, secretive Lorna Kepler.  In confronting the ghost of the dead Lorna, Kinsey must enter the dark, subterranean worlds of prostitution, pornography, political corruption, graft, greed, and dysfunctional family secrets.

© 1997 by Mary Daniels Brown

Cornwell, Patricia. Cause of Death (1996)  
G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 340 pages, $25.95 hardcover  
ISBN 0 399 14146 4

This book opens with a powerful image:  “On the last morning of Virginia’s bloodiest year since the Civil War, I built a fire and sat facing a window of darkness where at sunrise I knew I would find the sea” (p. 1).  Particularly in view of the bleak ending of the previous novel (From Potter’s Field), one hopes the new year and sunrise over the sea may bring light and a ray of new hope to Dr. Kay Scarpetta.

Alas, it is not to be. Scarpetta is still brittle, adversarial, reclusive, and self-righteously self-absorbed.  In the opening scene she reflects on the problems of being a woman medical examiner as she verbally jockeys for position with the local police and the Navy over who has the right to oversee removal of a corpse.  Later she describes her new house in Richmond: 

My stone house was set back from the street on a bluff that overlooked a rocky bend in the James River, the wooded lot surrounded by a wrought iron fence neighboring children could not squeeze through. I knew no one on any side of me, and had no intention of changing that. (p. 93)

Kay speaks smugly about her predecessor as Chief Medical Examiner, who was a Southern good ol’ boy:  “I did not think the former chief would like his office now, for it was nonsmoking, and disrespect and sophomoric behavior were left outside the door” (p. 138).  But most disturbing is her dismissive attitude toward Marino, her colleague and protector: “Marino was very displeased because he was overly protective” (p. 8) and “Marino wanted to talk.  He did not want to be with the guys or alone.  He wanted to be with me, but he would never admit that.  In all the years I had known him, his feelings for me were a confession he could not make, no matter how obvious they might be” (p. 53).

Scarpetta exhibits more compassion and concern toward the corpses she examines than she does toward Marino here.

But worse than the deterioration of Scarpetta’s character is the decline of Cornwell’s writing skills. In this novel Cornwell resorts to thriller techniques (terrorists taking hostages inside a nuclear power plant) instead of character development and the interweaving of plot and character. Near the end of the book, Scarpetta, inside the nuclear plant with the terrorists and trying to bluff for time, tells their leader, “`You don’t know.’  I showed no emotion because I had accepted this was the day I would die, and I was not afraid of it” (p. 334). The reader has absolutely no idea where this bravado (fearlessness? foolishness?) has come from. Finally, the novel ends much too abruptly, as though the author has either run out of steam or reached the required number of pages.

© 1997 by Mary Daniels Brown

Cornwell, Patricia. From Potter’s Field  (1995)  
Scribner, 412 pages, $24.00 hardcover  
ISBN 0-684-19598-4

In the few days surrounding Christmas, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, Pete Marino (now a police captain), and FBI agent Benton Wesley pursue Temple Gault, a serial killer who has appeared in earlier Scarpetta novels. Scarpetta’s niece, computer whiz Lucy, now age 21 and soon to graduate from the University of Virginia, is still working on the FBI’s computerized project CAIN (Criminal Apprehension Information Network), which Gault has apparently broken into. 

Dr. Scarpetta does little but whine in this book.  She begins by bemoaning how terrible her job in general is since she always has to deal with dead people who’ve been victimized by various monsters; she gets more strident as the police tighten security around her when they suspect Gault is closing in on her and Lucy.  At one point Marino insists on staying at her house so she won’t be there alone.  (Kay, of course, will not heed his warnings that she should stay somewhere else until Gault is captured.)  At about 5:00 a.m. she sneaks out to an all-night grocery store.  When she returns Marino screams at her about the chance she’s just taken and orders her to get into the house.  She screams back, “This is my house.  Not your house. . . . This, goddam it, is my house. And I will get in it when I please” (p. 293).  Marino (bless his heart) snaps back, “Good. And you can die in it just like you can die anywhere else.”

Scarpetta is hardening into a mean-spirited, alienated person with a gigantic chip on her shoulder. Since much of her isolation and misery seem self-induced, it’s getting harder and harder to care about her. The book ends on an ominously cold note, with Scarpetta standing over a dying man on the New York City subway tracks saying, “A train was coming and I did not move him free of the tracks. I walked away and did not look back”  (p. 411).

© 1997 by Mary Daniels Brown