SOURCE: Schegulla, Eva. “Thriller.” The Armchair Detective 26, no. 3 (summer 1993): 118.

In the following review, Schegulla offers a positive assessment of Cruel and Unusual.

Dr. Kay Scarpetta performs an autopsy on Ronnie Joe Waddell, a convicted murderer executed by electric chair. The same night, a young boy is murdered and left in the same position as Waddell left his victim, ten years earlier. Shortly thereafter, a psychic with a connection to Ronnie Joe is murdered, and then, Scarpetta's assistant, Susan Story. Fingerprints from the sites lead back to the executed man.

To save her job and her reputation, Scarpetta enters a maze of scandal, intrigue, conspiracy, pay-offs, computer hacking, questionable identities and luminol. She is assisted by her teenage niece, Lucy, her friends Lt. Marino and FBI agent Benton Wesley—and by one of her former professors, Nicholas Grueman, with whom she frequently locked horns in the past.

Although the...