Black Notice

What's in this book, at a glance — five things readers want to know before they start.

What this book is about

When a badly decomposed body arrives in a shipping container at the Richmond docks, Scarpetta begins an investigation that leads to France and a killer with connections to European organized crime. Meanwhile, her professional and personal life has come apart in ways that affect her judgment throughout. Patricia Cornwell's tenth Scarpetta novel is the most personally focused of the series — the investigation is secondary to Scarpetta's psychological state — and marks the transition from the procedurally clean early books to the more emotionally turbulent later entries. The forensic detail remains clinical; the human detail gets harder to read.