SOURCE: Champlin, Charles. “Criminal Pursuits.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (4 September 1994): 18.

In the following excerpt, Champlin discusses Cornwell's use of scientific detail in The Body Farm, as well as the difficulties her female characters seem to have in maintaining romantic relationships.

In The Body Farm Patricia Cornwell extends the adventures of Dr. Kay Scarpetta, Richmond's medical examiner, currently on detached service to lend the FBI some forensic know-how. A child in a remote North Carolina hill town has been brutally murdered, possibly by a serial killer named Gault, who narrowly eluded Scarpetta once before.

No one can accuse Cornwell of skimping on illustrative detail. This is probably the grisliest of the five Scarpetta novels, including an exhumation. The farm of the title is the University of Tennessee's Decay Research Facility, which works on cadavers to yield ways of determining times of death with ever-greater accuracy—an important crime-solving...