Sarah's Library

29/3 - I agree with the other reviewers who said that the title of this book is misleading, this book is more about the FBI than it is the body farm. It would have made more sense to name it Quantico or something else that refers to where a lot of the book is located, instead of a very interesting place that really only gets a mention near the beginning and a quick visit at the end. If a book is titled The Body Farm you would expect the body farm to make a big impact on the story, possibly for the body to be found at the body farm and for Scarpetta to spend most of the book determining how it got there and why (there was a Bones episode that features a similar scenario, The Feet on the Beach) or for there to be a need to do numerous experiments with bodies to determine some fact pertinent to the case, not just one, most of which was done off the page.

Marino is being a particularly large jerk in this book and shows hints of future assholery (that I won't mention further because it would be a huge spoiler for a book far into the future) that makes me mad just thinking about it. I've already started the next book, From Potter's Field and don't see how Scarpetta can (or think I could) go back to behaving normally around Marino. After the way he treated her and Benton I can't believe she was able to go back to the semi-healthy working relationship she had with him before. In my head I always imagined Marino looking and behaving like Skipp Sudduth's character John 'Sully' Sullivan in Third Watch, who isn't particularly appealing in personality or (to be honest) appearance.

Unfortunately, I had to dock a star due to the false advertising of a book about the body farm that wasn't actually about the farm at all and because I have a question about the passage of time between this book and the previous one. On page 74 of Cruel and Unusual Lucy is described as being Kay's 17-year-old niece, but on page four of The Body Farm she is described as being 21 which conflicts with the fact that on page 19 Gault's murder of Eddie Heath is described as being "nearly two years" earlier. For me that's a really irritating, and easily avoidable, mistake to make. If you know your characters well, you shouldn't get confused as to how old they are from one book to the next. Unless of course it was done on purpose so that Lucy would be realistically old enough to be working for the FBI and she just hoped that with the passage of time, between the publication of one book and the next, no one would notice (naughty, naughty *shakes finger* that's not very respectful to readers who notice details and enjoy rereading an entire series one book after another).