The Front

At the start of this weak sequel to 2006's At Risk from bestseller Cornwell, Monique Lamont, a politically ambitious D.A., uses a speech at the John F. Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, Mass., to launch an implausible anticrime initiative she's labeled No Neighbor Left Behind (""The decline of neighborhoods is potentially as destructive as global warming""). Lamont orders her main investigator, Win Garano, to reopen the case of a blind English woman, Janie Brolin, murdered in Watertown in 1962. Lamont suspects Brolin may have been the first victim of the notorious Boston Strangler. For reasons that Lamont fails to coherently articulate, solving this crime will galvanize the public into caring about crime in general. Not incidentally, it will also bolster her chances of ascending to greater power. Lamont's irresponsible approach to her job may strike some readers as bizarre, while Garano's ambivalence about his boss adds little to his appeal. The unsophisticated depiction of power politics (e.g., Lamont suggests to the governor of Massachusetts that solving Brolin's murder will make him Time magazine's man of the year) is not what the legions of Kay Scarpetta fans have come to expect.