Red Mist

The aftermath of the bloodshed in 2010’s Port Mortuary figures heavily in bestseller Cornwell’s solid if scattered 19th thriller featuring medical examiner Kay Scarpetta. Lured from her home in Cambridge, Mass., to Savannah, Ga., to visit Kathleen Lawler—the woman who molested Scarpetta’s recently murdered colleague, Jack Fielding, as a child and later bore their daughter—at the Georgia Prison for Women, Scarpetta angrily realizes that she’s been tricked. Ex-Manhattan ADA Jaime Berger wants Scarpetta’s help exonerating a woman on death row for the murder nine years earlier of Savannah’s Dr. Clarence Jordan and his family. What first seems like a cold case becomes terrifyingly current when fresh bodies start appearing. Scarpetta begins questioning whether the Jordan family slaying is linked to the murders in Massachusetts in Mortuary at the hands of Dawn Kincaid, the brilliant psychopath daughter of Lawler and Fielding. As in other recent work, Cornwell overloads the plot, but Scarpetta’s tangled emotional state and her top-notch forensic knowledge more than compensate. Author tour. Agent: Esther Newberg at ICM. (Dec.)