Predator: Scarpetta (Book 14)

US: Berkley, 2006. Very Good. It's not often a crime novel offers such a smorgasbord of oddball elements, including autopsy advice, methods of combating tree blight, the use of spi ders in sadomasochist torture and couples covering the sexual and psycholog ical waterfronts. There's even a little nasty fun at the expense of televis ion psychoanalysts. With geographic locations switching slightly faster tha n the speed of sound, it's to Reading's credit that she smoothes out the ul tra rumpled excesses of Cornwell's mind-boggling plot and takes full advant age of the yarn's narrator-friendly present tense. Having given voice to se veral earlier books in the series, she's got the main characters down cold. Her Dr. Kay Scarpetta is all snarky professional reserve and personal inse curity. Self-loathing lesbian niece Lucy, sounds properly troublesome and t roubled, with an added catch in the throat due to a secret she's keeping. P ete Marino, the bullet-headed, gym rat security chief of the Lucy-originate d National Forensic Academy, sounds so gruff and aggressive, he should be k ept on a chain leash. And Scarpetta's inamorato, Benton Wesley, whose study of mass murderers' brain patterns gives the novel its title, is, as his na me suggests, the very model of a dry, annoyingly passive-aggressive persona lity. The joke here-intended or not-is that the novel's protagonists are al most as mentally or emotionally disturbed as its homicidal villains. Cornwe ll seems to have grown weary of the lot of them. But there's still a flicke r of life left and Reading has the skill to make the most of it. Copyright ® Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights re.