The Bone Bed by Patricia Cornwell
(Putnam Adult, 2012, 480 pages)
The Bone Bed (A Scarpetta Novel) by Patricia Cornwell begins with Chief Medical Examiner, Kay Scarpetta, receiving what appears to be a picture of a severed ear. The ear may be the ear of a woman who disappeared while digging in a dinosaur bed in rural Canada. Before Dr. Scarpetta can solve that mystery, more mystery comes her way. Scarpetta helps pull a body out of the water. It is a woman who is badly decomposed, but did not die from drowning. The cause of death seems almost impossible to determine. Then, there is a case of third woman who disappeared and is presumed dead, but her body has not been found. As you might expect, these three cases are all related.
In The Bone Bed, Cornwell brings back a side of Scarpetta that we have not seen in the past several novels. Cornwell shows Scarpetta as more human in this novel. We see Scarpetta interact with her husband, Benton, her niece, Lucy, and her investigator, Marino. We see Scarpetta cooking and showing her emotional side.
The Bone Bed is the twentieth Scarpetta medical thriller. I like the way that Cornwell integrates the three separate murders to finally conclude that there is a serial killer on the loose. If you are a Patricia Cornwell fan or a medical thriller fan, I recommend The Bone Bed.
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