It’s time to say a solemn farewell to one of the cornerstones of the female investigator genre. Kay Scarpetta, brainchild of bestseller Patricia Cornwell, has drowned in the B-movie flavored miasma that is her newest novel Blow Fly. Ever since Cornwell took a hiatus from Scarpetta nothing has been the same. In the three-year span that she shelved the character, she has unsuccessfully strayed into the same world through the eyes of Andy Brazil with Southern Cross, Isle of the Dogs, Hornets Nest, and the overly emotional non-fiction exploration of artist Walter Sickert in Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper, Case Closed.

Vintage Scarpetta will never go sour. However, anyone who picks up the latest novel will find it bitter, especially if they’re familiar with formerly brainy, vulnerable and now-boneable Scarpetta. Stylistically, Cornwell has worked primarily as a first-person narrator until she ventured into the disjointed third-person awkwardness of Blow Fly. She goes for the eerie effect in exploring the emotions of a serial killer but it becomes more of a test of the gross-out factor.

First off, she does what no credible writer would and revives Benton Wesley, Scarpetta’s lover and FBI profiler who burned to death in Point of Origin, claiming that he’d been in a witness protection program for the last five years. She shamelessly employs all that is wrong with the genre creating a novel that is low on the detailed forensic analysis that her audience loves and high on the plot-thin, sex-rich elements that made John Grisham rich.

We get to know detective and struggling single mom, Nic Robillard, whose mother was murdered in a small town outside of Baton Rouge, Louisiana where there is also a serial killer loose. Scarpetta, working as a private consultant, flies in from her shabby Florida digs to help on a cold case, and is drawn in with predictable results. In picking up where Black Notice left off, her mind is also heavily weighted by the pending execution of her nemesis Jean-Baptiste Chandonne, whose psychotic twin brother, Jay Talley, she had an affair with.

Jean-Baptiste, as a member of the Chandonne crime family, escaped public notice in France, only to come to America to continue his killing spree until the previous novel where Scarpetta blinded him with a formalin solution when he finally came for her. Talley acted as the Interpol mole and was eventually ferretted out. In Blow Fly, he hides out with his equally insane lover, Bev Kiffin, within the mires of the Louisiana bayous.

Any number of plot points remain unexplained, like how the Dard family relates to the Chandonnes and what exactly role The Last Precinct, Lucy’s company, even plays in fighting crime from the back alleys of the private sector. The novel appears to be an unremitting string of assassinations culminating with the eye-to-eye confrontation of Scarpetta and Wesley that lacks any semblance of credibility or emotion. Scarpetta opens her arms without asking many questions and forgives him for orchestrating a scheme that involved killing any number of people including her confidant Marino’s mafioso son.

The novel degenerates from a promising new venture into third person with the characteristic Scarpetta scientific analysis of the bluebottle (the blow fly from which the book derives its title) and ends with a mishmash of unfinished pieces, gunfire, and handholding that would have been better packaged as Rambo-meets-Harlequin romance. At least it would’ve been true to the tale. Perhaps Cornwell should use her shamanic powers as the omniscient author and raise all of Scarpetta’s old enemies so they can duel it out WWE-style in her next novel. It would make a hell of a movie.