Well, finally, you are thinking: an author I have actually heard of.

I read Patricia Cornwell and Sue Grafton when they were originally writing. But then I got tired of them. And, when my apartment flooded back in the early 90s, and I lost a good portion of my book collection, they were amongst those lost in the waters who didn’t return to shore. Shout out to my good friend who, understanding the trauma of having to sort through your flooded books and throw away those that were unsalvageable, volunteered to take it on. Somewhere I still have four sheets of yellow legal pad paper, double-sided, 1 book per line, memorializing the lost. I didn’t replace many of them, which might have been why they were on the lowest shelves, most at risk from a flood that came from above and then rose from below.

I got tired of Patricia Cornwell because her characters were too perfect. Kay Scarpetta was always right and always on the right side. Her perfect niece who, when I stopped reading, was a top flight hacker at a ridiculously young age, and already on her way to becoming a super-spy.

I also stopped reading because I get really tired of main characters who get stalked by some super-criminal who refuses to die book after book after book. Oh come on, a coroner getting stalked by a super-criminal? That’s as plausible as imagining that a director of public health or a pollworker getting stalked by…

Oh.

Anyway, at the time, I was over that. So I stopped.

So why did I start again?

Bigfoot.

I kept seeing interviews with Patricia Cornwell about how she had seen some intriguing (or was it, interesting?) evidence about bigfoot. And she thought it was worth including in her new book.

Really?

Okay. This I had to see – the hard-headed Kay Scarpetta and her uber-niece against bigfoot.

So I bit.

Spoiler-alert: bigfoot themself doesn’t appear in the book. It’s just footprints – one footprint, to be precise – and some mysterious wood-knocking. You can see that on Discovery channel any time. And, in the end, Cornwell declares it proof and moves on.

The rest of the book was interesting at first. Crazy right-wing domestic terrorists in league with the Russians: check. Uber-niece is now a member of the secret service, flies cutting edge helicopters, and has created an AI that replicates her wife who died of COVID: check. (Or did she die of COVID? The question gets raised.) Even as an underpaid and underappreciated coroner, married to a handsome CIA suit, Scarpetta can afford an unbelievable home in a historical neighborhood. Clearly she has moved from mystery to fantasy.

Cornwell is a good writer, so I was having fun, following her through the woods and into abandoned mines, wondering about the mysterious death of the man on the tractor and the dentist – could it all be connected, how? Admiring super-niece’s ability to pilot the helicopter into impossible places, while hacking on her heads-up glasses, and dissing the intrusive reporter, all at the same time.

Until – spoiler alert – the super-criminal reappeared about half-way through.

Oh god.

This was the same super-criminal that was stalking her when I quit reading 20 years ago. They thought she had died in a fire in the insane asylum but noooooo, she’s back.

After that, I felt like I was marching through the rest of the book, as the situations got more and more unbelievable. I’ve been reading a lot of Final Girl books lately (stay tuned on those), and nobody piles up coincidences and unbelievable situations like a Final Girl – except, apparently, Kay Scarpetta.

All that and then her proof of bigfoot is a footprint with a mysterious hair?

Give me a break.