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alexblackreads 's review for:
Chaos
by Patricia Cornwell
Judging from some of the reviews, this seems like maybe one of the worst books in the Kay Scarpetta series? Which makes it extra unfortunate that this was my second chance for the series. I didn't like the first book, Post Mortem, but this one was so much worse. It's basically nothing. Nothing happens, except for like a six page climax that ends while the main character is unconscious so we don't even get to see half of it.
The majority of the book takes place in one night. Kay Scarpetta is walking to meet her husband at dinner. Someone fakes a 911 call about her being a nuisance, which is irritating to her and maybe vaguely threatening, but not that serious. She gets called away from dinner because a dead body has been found. She examines the dead body. Would you believe that summary is for more than 300 pages of this book? It felt never ending.
So much of the time is wasted by Scarpetta thinking about random things and explaining their whole backstory. I get that in a long running series like this you need a little catch up on main events, but this was so excessive. There would be a single line of dialogue and then like two pages of Scarpetta explaining why the character said that and how they got to that point over the last 24 books, and what they truly meant by the words, and the underlying meaning of their inflection. Like occasionally that kind of thing is fine, but it would take forty pages to get through a single brief conversation because that was every line of dialogue.
And nothing made sense. Despite the fact that nothing was happening and their entire backstories were endlessly explained, it was so hard to follow. She had a stalker that I never really understood. Some people were treating it like she was about to be murdered and some were treating it like a mild nuisance. I could never get a read on that situation. It was hard to follow the concrete actions of the book, like who was present and what they were doing and why. The whole thing was such a jumbled mess.
This was insufferable. I didn't like the first book in this series either, but my complaints about it were pretty mild and generic. All of the books in the series can't possibly be this bad, but I do not have it in me to try another.
The majority of the book takes place in one night. Kay Scarpetta is walking to meet her husband at dinner. Someone fakes a 911 call about her being a nuisance, which is irritating to her and maybe vaguely threatening, but not that serious. She gets called away from dinner because a dead body has been found. She examines the dead body. Would you believe that summary is for more than 300 pages of this book? It felt never ending.
So much of the time is wasted by Scarpetta thinking about random things and explaining their whole backstory. I get that in a long running series like this you need a little catch up on main events, but this was so excessive. There would be a single line of dialogue and then like two pages of Scarpetta explaining why the character said that and how they got to that point over the last 24 books, and what they truly meant by the words, and the underlying meaning of their inflection. Like occasionally that kind of thing is fine, but it would take forty pages to get through a single brief conversation because that was every line of dialogue.
And nothing made sense. Despite the fact that nothing was happening and their entire backstories were endlessly explained, it was so hard to follow. She had a stalker that I never really understood. Some people were treating it like she was about to be murdered and some were treating it like a mild nuisance. I could never get a read on that situation. It was hard to follow the concrete actions of the book, like who was present and what they were doing and why. The whole thing was such a jumbled mess.
This was insufferable. I didn't like the first book in this series either, but my complaints about it were pretty mild and generic. All of the books in the series can't possibly be this bad, but I do not have it in me to try another.