The 35th Precinct

LJ seems to be slowly dragging itself back to functionality. Good thing, too, since Sprache XXI is finished and will be posted in a few days. It's practically begging for another porntastic interlude, but I've been champing at the bit to get this Haldirfic rolling, so Richard's raging hardon will have to wait.

Despite the fact that I failed to meet my goal of forty books for the 2012 Goodreads Reading Challenge, I immediately signed on for the 2013 challenge. With fifty books this time. Because if I couldn't make forty, fifty will be a snap. My first book to that end is Unnatural Exposure, the eighth Kay Scarpetta novel. Terrible, so terrible. The case is interesting, but as usual it's all about asswipes gunning for stone-cold hardass Scarpetta. Assistant has AIDS? All about Scarpetta's sorrow. Her niece might be outed by an ambitious, amoral toerag of an FBI agent? All about Scarpetta's guilt. HIV-positive assistant might have been exposed to smallpox during an autopsy? Fuck him, so was Scarpetta, but she's nobly going to work the case by phone from quarantine and treat the young nurse like an unwanted nuisance because God forbid she try to enforce protocol when Kay has a world to save. One day soon, Scarpetta will disappear up her own ass, and I can't wait.

I must be hormonal, because Rednex's "Wish You Were Here" is the perfect emo apertif right now.

I finished Fear last night. Faulty mechanics aside, the story was engrossing. It faltered badly after the Adder Swamp and descended into hackneyed cliches and scenes dredged from the fetid bowels of badfic written by a nine-year-old boy who plays too many bad video games and makes explosion sound effects with his mouth that bear an uncanny resemblance to a flushing toilet, but until then, it was possessed of a queer and occasionally startling vibrancy. It's too bad it wasn't in defter hands.

Today, I started From Potter's Field, the sixth Kay Scarpetta novel. Is it me, or does Scarpetta get more sanctimonious and grating with every book? At first, her flaws were fairly balanced, offset by her talent as a medical examiner and her sense of decency. But now, she's gone from confident to overweening and hypocritical. She's no longer the voice of reason, but the voice of ultimate rightness. Now she is the only one who can Truly See, and everyone else is either a simpleton or a conniving toolbox with nefarious motives. She is right, right, right, and her every instinct is given the weight of trufax, yo.

And the hypocrisy. Oh, the hypocrisy. If someone refuses to kowtow and bow to her constant hectoring and judgment, then they're unreasonable, but if she refuses to listen to her friends when they suggest she take measures to protect herself from the latest lunatic to set his sights upon her(because they always, always do), then she's courageous and defiant and refusing to fold under the pressure. It's absolutely okay for her to meddle in her grown niece's affairs, but ask her questions she'd rather not answer, then fuck you, buddy.

And don't get me started on the affair. If it were anyone else, Scarpetta would be judging them so hard that her clit would pop off from the magnitude of the self-righteousness boner, but because it's her, we're supposed to root for her and hate the wife who has no idea about the affair. Oh, Scarpetta pays feeble lip service to guilt and the wrongness of her actions, but Cornwell clearly wants us to side with Scarpetta, who has sacrificed so much and suffered so long and therefore "deserves" to be happy, even if that happiness hurts someone who has treated her with kindness and respect. It's utterly self-serving, and it makes me want to set the book on fire.

And the fact that the list of characters who want to bone Scarpetta grows with every book only adds to my rage. No, Cornwell, it isn't believable that a cop, two FBI agents, and possibly a female transit officer all want to bump uglies with your sixty-year-old medical examiner with the charm and personality of a Russian outhouse.

I'm determined to see the series through, however, so I must gird my loins and carry on.

I'm nearly finished with Post-Mortem, the first Kay Scarpetta novel. The mystery is fairly boilerplate, and I'm not sure what to think of the supposedly self-assured protagonist. She claims to be confident and capable in her position as chief medical examiner, but she reads as paranoid, indecisive, judgmental, and prone to fits of internal hysteria. Maybe it's the proliferation of exclamation points that accompany every discovery, but the self-assured career woman sounds like a shrinking horror-movie violet creeping around the spooky slaughterhouse in her nightie with nothing but her loveliness to protect her from the Bad Thing in dogged pursuit. What's more, she's quick to believe the worst of the hard-boiled, good-ole-boy gumshoe and her love interest, the dashing Commonwealth attorney. If this ends up a dramatic scheme by misogynistic law-enforcement power brokers to oust the uppity, intrepid Chief M.E. just because she's a she, I'm hurling the book across the room like a musty, yellowing shot.