The 35th Precinct

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.