Wow, Patricia Cornwell is a complex person. She married young, to her university professor 17 years her senior, and divorced him 9 years later. Then she met a woman and fell in love; now 66, she came out about herself and that relationship at age 50 upon talking on the value and power of doing so with (who else?) Billie Jean King. She and her brothers were raised in a home by a couple who Billy Graham's wife, Ruth Bell Graham, connected them with after they and their mother were taken in by the Graham-ily some time after their father left them. Cornwell was a personal friend of former president George H.W. Bush, later criticized his son's administration, and has donated over time to prominent politicians of both major political parties. On top of all this: She's a descendant of Harriet Beecher Stowe.

To this book itself, and the ongoing saga of chief medical examiner Kay Scarpetta, Cornwell's hero across 26 tomes to date: Her crime stories are page-turners, but not feckless ones with cliffhangers at the end of every three-page chapter a la Dan Brown and his ilk. The chapters are more robust, the story ebbs and flows, and the procedural dialogue is sharp.

There are just so many characters. Too many. I wasn't acquainted with this series – my intro and sole read from Cornwell to date was Hornet's Nest, another innovative murder/crime caper but with a different protagonist, Andy Brazil – and I yearned for a flow chart for all the players who dropped in and faded back in this tale. There were seven pivotal people here but what felt like 27 populating it. Many of them induced "meh"s; they were nondescript. I understand it's a two-dozen story series by this point, with some themes, motives and people reappearing over the books, but a few political-power subplots felt vexingly tangential.

The forensic stuff is detailed (Cornwell knows her ish) but not whelming in a way that takes the reader out of it. [*Slight spoiler alert*] The microwave-generating "gun" used by the killer(s) seemed to me a novel way to slay, and a fraught prospect in our postmodern world. The problem is that the reveal doesn't quite pay off. I was so ready for a crucial but deceased character's interior thoughts, their journals, to be drawn on to solve the case, but the denouement comes rather abruptly after 350ish pages, though admittedly, the final 60 to 80 pages definitely had me rolling to the end.

I myself may be done with the Scarpetta series – generally finding her interior monologues to be self-aggrandizing – but fans of procedural drama will likely inhale these reads.