Dear Ms Cornwell Patricia Pat Author,

I am certainly not your earliest reader, but I was there from the start. I read Postmortem in the first year it was published and from then you were firmly on my list of authors for crime fiction, essential for inserting between more involved reading on my daily public transport commute. Every time a new tome was released, I would rush out to buy it (as soon as it reached the more readable small paperback format).

I don’t know what has happened. I no longer rush out to buy your novels nor even keep track of when they are coming out. I bought one two weeks ago and I have read three other books while it has been sitting in reserve on my bedside table. I finally cracked it open a couple of days ago and yet last night when I left it in the car after coming home from work, I never bothered to go out and get it. And I think I have figured out why.

My once favourite books are now a chore. Once, Dr Kay Scarpetta was a feisty medical examiner, highly competent and battling against the tide as a female in a male dominated world. She indulged in life - as a cigarette smoking, scotch drinking forensic specialist should. She was emotional and clashed with Captain Pete Marino and FBI profiler Benton Wesley when warranted. And she seemed like she really was actually fond of her niece Lucy.

Well you stuffed all of that to hell.

First she quit smoking and drinking, then she became such a prissy holier than thou pain in the arse that I didn’t even like her. Why is she constantly sighing and being exasperated or biting her tongue from nagging at someone. And when she is not doing that she is nagging people incessantly while bitching about how people take her for granted. Grow up.

And good old Pete Marino. He used to be a boorish rednecked cop with a heart of gold, but then you seemed to want to manufacture some sexual tension or some such. And ever since then he has been bouncing around like a pinball, one day turning up in motorcycle leathers (what happened to the truck with the rebel flag in the back window?) and the next decked out in all sorts of fashionable duds - invariably a consequence of a dangerous entanglement with some girl or other. Why couldn’t he just go back to missing Doris?

And don’t get me started on Benton Wesley. A decent character even when he started cheating on his wife with Dr Kay in a succession of anonymous hotel rooms. But he was your downfall - the storyline which really meant that the Kay Scarpetta series had jumped the shark. He DIED. You had him killed off by a bad guy, remember? And yes, while the body was burned to a crisp, that was actually a pretty good means of exploring everyone’s struggle to accept the death of a major character. It is NOT, repeat NOT a chance for you to have him turn up three books later with some convoluted story about how he had faked his death to investigate some conspiracy theory blah blah blah. Sorry, I must have nodded off there for a while.

So, I am sorry to say, I think that it is time for us to part company. It’s not me, it’s you. Even in a relationship with such low expectations, you just aren’t reaching them anymore. I think a clean break is best. I might finish reading this last book sometime, I might pick up a new one in an airport newsagency in the future, but let’s not grasp at faint hope. Let’s just accept that it is over and I am moving on to new opportunities. I don’t imagine that the loss of my sales will make much of a difference to your squillions of dollars in earnings.

Yours

A reader.

PS. You look like a schmuck in your author photo.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 20th, 2007 at 2:30 pm by dan and is filed under random musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.