Chaos, Patricia Cornwell
Chaos, Patricia Cornwell
47 Rating(s)
List: $29.99 | Sale: $21.00
Club: $14.99

Chaos
A Scarpetta Novel

Author: Patricia Cornwell

Narrator: Susan Ericksen

Unabridged: 13 hr 3 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: HarperAudio

Published: 11/15/2016


Synopsis

#1 New York Times bestselling author Patricia Cornwell returns with the remarkable twenty-fourth thriller in her popular high-stakes series starring medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta.In the quiet of twilight, on an early autumn day, twenty-six-year-old Elisa Vandersteel is killed while riding her bicycle along the Charles River. It appears she was struck by lightning—except the weather is perfectly clear with not a cloud in sight. Dr. Kay Scarpetta, the Cambridge Forensic Center’s director and chief, decides at the scene that this is no accidental Act of God.Her investigation becomes complicated when she begins receiving a flurry of bizarre poems from an anonymous cyberbully who calls himself Tailend Charlie. Though subsequent lab results support Scarpetta’s conclusions, the threatening messages don’t stop. When the tenth poem arrives exactly twenty-four hours after Elisa’s death, Scarpetta begins to suspect the harasser is involved, and sounds the alarm to her investigative partner Pete Marino and her husband, FBI analyst Benton Wesley.She also enlists the help of her niece, Lucy. But to Scarpetta’s surprise, tracking the slippery Tailend Charlie is nearly impossible, even for someone as brilliant as her niece. Also, Lucy can’t explain how this anonymous nemesis could have access to private information. To make matters worse, a venomous media is whipping the public into a frenzy, questioning the seasoned forensics chief’s judgment and ""a quack cause of death on a par with spontaneous combustion.""

About Patricia Cornwell

Patricia Cornwell is a Miami born, contemporary crime novelist. Her books usually feature the heroine Dr. Kay Scarpetta, who is a medical examiner. After a way sad childhood, Cornwall graduated from Davidson College with a degree in English. She wrote a biography of a family friend entitled, “A Time for Remembering”, then renamed “Ruth, A Portrait: The Story of Ruth Bell Graham” in 1983. After working in a Virginia medical examiners for six years, she wrote the first installment of her “Scarpetta” series entitled “Postmortem”. Her six year job was valuable in including a lot of forensic science details in her “Scarpetta” series. Her novels are considered to have influenced the creation of the TV series on forensics such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and Cold Case. In the same vein Cornwell made a brief appearance on the Criminal Minds episode “True Genius”, as herself.


Reviews

Goodreads review by James on January 17, 2020

Chaos is the 24th book in the 'Kay Scarpetta' thriller and suspense series focusing on a medical examiner's investigations. It is currently the last book Patricia Cornwell has written in this series as of 2016 as well as serves as the third issue in an arc about serial killer Carrie Grethen. The nove......more

Goodreads review by PamG on February 15, 2022

Chaos by Patricia Cornwell is a medical mystery set in Cambridge, Massachusetts and featuring medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta. This is the twenty-fourth book in the series and it helps to read this series in order. Kay and Detective Pete Marino respond to a call about a dead bicyclist. But be......more

Goodreads review by Cardmaker on December 31, 2016

I think it's time for Patricia Cornwell to hang up her pen. This story is excruciatingly slow and the title describes the author's mindset while she was writing it. Cornwell has always loved describing things but in this book, she's outdone herself. If she describes once how her bare feet in fancy s......more

Goodreads review by L.A. on February 05, 2017

Patricia Cornwell's entire Kay Scarpetta oeuvre deserves reading, including this book. No one else writes with such verve and authority about the tales the dead tell in the autopsy suite. That said, this book started very slowly and with an annoyingly constrained style. Too much repetition of "I can'......more

Goodreads review by Jean on December 04, 2016

I keep asking myself why do I bother to continue to read this series. Cornwell has gotten into a typical pattern and the ending is easy to figure out. On the other hand, the forensic detail is most interesting and new developments in the fields are also included in the story. Kay Scarpetta is head of......more