RSS
Home
James Patterson interviews Patricia Cornwell about The Scarpetta Factor
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
.JPG)
Amazon.com has recently come up with the appealing idea of having bestselling novelists interview each other to mutually promote their works. Two recent participants in this exchange are Patricia Cornwell, whose Kay Scarpetta series novel The Scarpetta Factor was just released on October 20, 2009 and James Patterson, whose latest Alex Cross title, I Alex Cross, is due out on November 16.
The Amazon.com Scarpetta Factor page features Patterson questioning Cornwell about her work. Later, on the page for Patterson's I, Alex Cross, Cornwell gets the opportunity to cross-examine (painful pun intended) Patterson.
In response to Patterson's encouragement to "tell us about this one, Patricia," Cornwell provides this description of The Scarpetta Factor:
As was true in the last book (Scarpetta), the new one is set in New York City, and it begins with Kay Scarpetta working on the autopsy of a young woman who presumably was murdered the night before in Central Park. While the apparent circumstances of the violent crime say one thing, the body is telling Scarpetta a very different and incredibly disturbing story that causes the prosecutor, the police, other officials, and even Scarpetta's friends and colleagues, to wonder if she's making mistakes. . . . As the intrigue unfolds, the past is no longer past, and she is soon faced with an old nemesis who threatens to be her final undoing.
Later in the interview, Cornwell points to a difference in tone between her more recent Kay Scarpetta novels and some of their predecessors. Answering Patterson's question, "What's the best feedback you've had from a reader?" she reveals that a reader once told her that he wasn't sure that she still liked her own characters. "And I thought about this and realized I wasn’t sure I did, either," Cornwell comments.
The characters in her long running series, begun with the novel Postmortem in 1990, had gone too many years without change, Cornwell realized, and they needed "reinventing." She began the renewal process, of which she says, "I think this remake is most apparent in the last book, Scarpetta, and I am on a wonderful and invigorating new course that is even more evident in the new one, The Scarpetta Factor."
One of the major changes Scarpetta has made in her series has been its setting. She has moved Dr. Kay Scarpetta, her husband, Benton Wesley, and her niece, Lucy Farinelli, to New York City and has even given detective Pete Marino a position with the NYPD.
In the YouTube video below Cornwell, standing with the backdrop of New York City, comments on the importance the change in locale has had on the series. Of The Scarpetta Factor particularly, she advises her readers, "You're going to find out in this book what has really gone on in the lives of these characters that you just didn't know."
Related Articles:
Add a Comment
