Just Finished Reading Patricia Cornwell's Novel: At Risk

Two or three years ago I bought a cheap used paperback copy of one of novelist Patricia Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta's novels (and I can't for the life of me remember its title).  Scarpetta is a forensic pathologist/investigator who is featured in a long-running series of Cornwell.  I'm not sure why I didn't finish it, other than that I got tired of the open antagonism expressed between its characters.  It gets a little tedious after a while reading that, almost as if the people themselves were surrounding me arguing.  Well, I decided to give Cornwell another try and got a copy of her short novel At Risk.  Dr. Scarpetta is nowhere to be found here; the protagonist is a young man named Win Garano, who is an investigator and whose mixed-race status sadly seems to rattle some people, even in the supposedly more enlightened 2006 setting of the story.  Win is working for a Massachusetts district attorney named Monique Lamont and has been sent to Tennessee to further his crime-stopping education.  He also is trying to solve a cold case murder in Knoxville more than twenty years old.  A new company that Monique is touting is providing cutting-edge DNA technology that can help to solve such mysteries, and Win, with his assistant, work to employ it to solve the case.  Meanwhile, Monique is attacked in her apartment and raped...what is the tie-in between this and what Win is doing...and that company in question?  Don't worry: in stories like this, nothing takes place by happenstance and everything ties in together...all to be resolved at the end.  And it is resolved.

But although I managed to get through this novel of Patricia Cornwell, and the characters were different this time around, they were just as argumentative and negative around each other as in the Kay Scarpetta book I had put down years earlier.  "Snippy", a term made famous by Al Gore when he briefly argued on the phone with George W. Bush on election night in 2000, would be an appropriate designation to describe the conversations these folks typically have: with At Risk, just imagine such a conversation between Gore and Bush that lasts about four hours....ouch, my ears!