Cornwell's styles is always engaging and does not disappoint with "Unnatural Exposure". That being said she does get a little technical when it comes to the forensic side of the descriptions. This is part of what makes her writing so great as it paints such detailed pictures. I am working my way through the whole Scarpetta series and have not read one yet i would not highly recommend. ( )

Once again Dr Kay Scarpetta, Chief Medical Examiner for the Commonwealth of Virginia, finds herself up against it. Already overworked, and fighting the impact of the furlough imposed on federal employees while Congress and the White House, she has been reviewing evidence that suggests a serial killer is at work in the state.

As the novel opens, she is in Ireland, presenting lectures to international colleagues, although she has also been reviewing the headless and limbless corpses of five victims of a killer who may now have relocated to Virginia. Satisfied that the perpetrator may be the same in all the cases under review, she returns home, and liaises with her regular investigatory partners, Captain Pete Marino, head of homicide in the Virginia Police Department, and Benton Wesley, the FBI’s senior profiler. Meanwhile, one of the Medical Examiners in her state-wide team, contacts her in a panic, convinced that one of the corpses he had recently been called to review may have died of Smallpox. It gradually emerges that these two unfolding horror stories may be connected.

Cornwell manages all of these plot elements fairly tightly, and certainly manages to build up the suspense. Unfortunately I felt that there were too many recurring elements with which we have grown all too familiar: a bigoted and narrow-minded lead investigator with his own agenda and deep-rooted (yet never properly explained) grudge against Scarpetta and anyone connected with her.

As with a few of her previous books, I felt a degree of frustration that someone as capable of writing a good, gripping thriller, should produce something as frequently clumsy as this book is. Cornwell’s first four or five novels were excellently plotted and constructed, with watertight and convincing stories, and highly plausible characters. Somewhere along the line, however, she seemed to lose some of her plot management skills, leaving subsequent books with a tendency to lose their focus. ( )

excellent - page-turner - k.s. is a good character ( )

Unnatural Exposure is another biological thriller featuring Dr. Kay Scarpetta, the infamous M.E. for the state of Virginia. This story features an insane scientist threatening to unleash a new killer strain of the smallpox virus on the world. The narrative occasionally gets bogged down in detailed descriptions of military procedures/equipment when the USAMRIID is called upon to help quarantine the infected but quickly picks up at the end when Kay singlehandedly apprehends the killer. ( )

It does scare me that governments have lethal diseases locked away for "safekeeping." I guess Patricia Cornwell had to write her version of it. I was not disappointed. ( )