I really, really want to like Patricia Cornwell’s books because forensic medicine is a subject that interests me, but I just don’t understand WHY a bestselling author can’t create a believable character. A chief ME who happens to be a gourmet Italian cook and a connoisseur of fine wines and has/had an affair with an FBI agent (because she fears committment *eyes madly rolling*) with whose wife she is supposed to be friendly “babysits” a rude, sloppy ill-spoken cop who just happens to be a brilliant investigator. Of course, Marino’s secretly in love with her. Puh-leeze. Incidentally, no one over the age of seventeen prefaces his sentences with, “Yo”, not even badly dressed clod cops. Don’t even get me started on The Amazing Lucy, the driven to succeed self-made millionaire genius I.Q. computer programmer FBI agent recovering substance abuser tortured adult child (of a self-absorbed single mother) who just happens to be a lesbian. Oh, and of course her mother doesn’t accept her sexual orientation. Do I call my aunt, behave rudely and make her feel guilty because she hasn’t come to see me? Of course not–because I’m not a spoilt child and any of my aunts would hang up on me if I did. Unless “Lucy” was supposed to be some kind of superhero-with-flaws-to-make-her-human comic book character, she’s an utter failure. I don’t see those chapters anyway because I just keep turning the pages as my eyes roll back in my head.

It’s my own fault; I read the blub on the cover and think, “Oh, sounds good–maybe this one will be different” when I should’ve learned by now that it won’t be different at all. Could be worse, though–at least I buy nightstand fodder in paperback and it took only two of that Johanssen woman’s for me to figure out that “NYT bestseller” means nothing. Heh.