Christmas had never been a particularly good time for Dr Kay Scarpetta. Although a holiday for most, it always seem to heighten the alienation felt by society's violent fringe; and that usually means more work for Scarpetta, Virginia's Chief Medical ExaminerI. The body was naked, female and found propped against a fountain in a bleak area of New York's Central Park. Her apparent manner of death points to a modus operandi that is chillingly familiar: the gunshot wound to the head, the sections of skin excised from the body, the displayed corpse - all suggest that Temple Brooks Gault, Scarpetta's nemesis, is back at work.
Kay Scarpetta and her colleagues-Benton Wesley, Pete Marino, and her niece Lucy Farinelli-return to a series of forensic cases as haunting as any they have ever tackled. Working with the National Forensic Institute in Florida, Scarpetta and Marino examine the X-rays of a man who has died from a shotgun blast to the chest. But the pellets embedded show a strange 'pinball' pattern and the two can't help but wonder if this points to suicide-or to murder. REUPLOAD NEEDED
Review
"The Marino Mission...a better read than prior attempts at this concept, which tried too hard to cram in large words." (Miami Herald, February 26, 2005)
