New York Review of Books-Rezension

AS A WORLD-RENOWNED forensic pathologist, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, the iron-willed protagonist of Patricia Cornwell's insanely popular procedural mysteries, is often called out of town for high-level professional consultations. That pattern is relaxed in CHAOS (Morrow/HarperCollins, $28.99), which finds Scarpetta at home with her husband, Benton Wesley, a criminal-intelligence agent for the F.B.I., and taking care of business as director of the Cambridge Forensic Center. Although she's hardly a lyrical writer, Cornwell allows her heroine a rare opportunity to express her affection for Boston, and especially for her favorite park along the Charles River. "I've been here many times," Scarpetta says, with some warmth, recalling hikes with Benton from their home near the Harvard campus in the "sublime" New England weather of the spring and fall. It doesn't seem fair, then, when a fresh-faced young woman with a British accent - someone Scarpetta and her husband had encountered earlier that day as she rode a bicycle through Cambridge - is found dead on the fitness path along the river. Because Boston is baking in a terrible heat wave, everything seems to be moving more slowly, so it takes half the book to set up a tent to secure the crime scene and allow Scarpetta to examine the corpse. "I'm getting more frustrated with each minute that passes," she fumes. "The body should be in the C.T. scanner. I should be setting up my autopsy station." Cornwell's readers should be able to relate to that. Not only is the autopsy a long time coming, it's less than interesting when Scarpetta finally gets around to it. Surprisingly, the young victim was zapped by a freak electrical charge - the same cause of death, it turns out, that claimed an Army general at the very same time, but hundreds of miles away. The possibility of "weaponized electricity" is the signal for the F.B.I. to step in, entering a plot that features a cyberstalker, a psycho from a previous book; Scarpetta's annoying sister, Dorothy; and Dorothy's brilliant, if seriously disturbed daughter, Lucy. Not one of them is dead and in need of an autopsy, which is a waste of Scarpetta's peculiar talents - and our time. AN ACT OF terrorism is unnerving in itself, but when this sort of violence takes the lives of children, rumblings of vigilante justice are often heard. That's the chaotic scene that greets Chief Inspector Bish Ortley in Melina Marchetta's TELL THE TRUTH, SHAME THE DEVIL (Mulholland/Little, Brown, $26) when he arrives in Calais to retrieve his daughter from a student tour of Normandy that ended abruptly when her bus was bombed and two people died. The French police are quick to suspect yet another student, Violette LeBrac Zidane, who comes from a family of terrorists. Marchetta, who has written several young adult novels, seems to have inside knowledge of the mysterious processes of the teenage brain. A busload of quarrelsome, immature adolescents doesn't daunt her in the least. Although they represent a bubbling melting pot of ethnicities, some with underlying political tensions, her young characters all stand out as individuals. Even at their most infuriating, they're always believable, if not as sympathetic as Bish Ortley, who carries a load of domestic problems on his shoulders. "There's something about him," Marchetta tells us. "The bloodshot eyes and sad teddy bear look. This man comes with a story." In HELL BAY (Minotaur, $25.99), Will Thomas puts a shrewd spin on the country house mystery by converting the traditional manor to a castle and shifting it to a remote location in the Isles of Scilly. ("The kingdom," according to legend, "where the faerie folk abandoned England, never to return.") Cyrus Barker, the series's diva detective, and his assistant, Thomas Llewelyn, who also serves as narrator, are working undercover at a high-stakes diplomatic meeting that the host, Lord Hargrave, attempts to camouflage as a house party. But on the very first night, Hargrave is shot dead by a sniper and a Sûreté agent with the French delegation is stabbed and thrown into the sea. When matters become really dire, the assembled guests decide to put on a show. ("It went rather well, considering the circumstances.") Thomas drops clever clues, and the setting is dramatic, but nothing beats the amateur entertainment organized by the guests, the murderer among them. EVERY ISLAND PARADISE has its resident eccentric. In Thomas Rydahl's first novel, THE HERMIT (Oneworld, $24.99), it's an OCtOgenarian Dane named Erhard, who has been living by himself for so long in the Canary Islands town of Puerto del Rosario that he's almost forgotten his native tongue. Erhard, who happens to be missing a finger, makes some money tuning pianos and driving a taxi. And when he comes across the mangled victim of a traffic accident, he snatches the man's detached finger for himself, a grim act that somehow "returns his balance to him." After a car is found on the beach with a dead baby in the back seat, the police bribe a young prostitute to play the troubled mother so they can close the case before the tourists get wind of it. But Erhard knows better, and he alone among his callous neighbors is determined to find the true killer. In K. E. Semmel's melancholy translation, this alienated old man proves to be a more complete human being than any of his 10-fingered friends.