Port Mortuary by Patricia Cornwell

Port Mortuary is the 18th book in Patricia Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta series.  I've read all of them and reviewed on my blog three others (this being the 4th).  In Port Mortuary, Kay is now the chief medical examiner of the new Cambridge Forensic Center (CFC) in Massachusetts.  This center has been Kay's creation, dream, and brainchild for the past year or so.  Since it's creation and opening, however, she's not been there to see to it's smooth operation.  Instead, she's been "training" at a military base in Dover.  Upon her return to Boston, Kay becomes involved in the mysterious and sudden death of a man and the murder of a child (whose confessed killer seems to be innocent). Kay realizes almost immediately that the two cases are related and that the answers aren't as simple as everyone seems to be making them out to be. 

I liked this book and give it 3 1/2 stars.  It gets a solid "Good" from me.  What I liked about it was that the story, the mystery, the murder was intriguing and I wanted to find out "whodunit".  It kept me turning the pages.  I liked that Kay seemed to be getting back to her element by the end:  Wrapped up in solving the case through the science that she's based her life on.  What I didn't like was the enigma that Patricia Cornwell has turned Kay and Benton's relationship into. Anne told me while I was reading (without giving anything away) that she worried about Kay moving into that "dark place" again and I think she was absolutely right.  Anne said by the end that she didn't feel that way but I'm not sure that we've seen the end of Benton's secret keeping.  He seems to be getting involved again in blocking her out of big chunks of his life and I hate to see her put up with that.  In addition, there were many issues left unanswered from the last book regarding Lucy that were not dealt with at all in this book.  Granted this book only covered 2-3 days, and it leaves a huge page open for writing but I WANT ANSWERS!  Hee hee.  Truly though and in all happy seriousness, I think with every book that Patricia Cornwell writes, she gets closer and closer to what she was doing in books like Potter's Field and Postmortem.  She just needs to not get so wrapped up in the technical, irrelevant details and simply tell the story.