Kathryn Fox was an Australian physician and her best selling series featuring freelance pathologist Anya Crichton made her one of Australia's most popular authors. She now writes for TV and film, and has written Private Sydney for James Patterson. Malicious Intent is the first in her series.
Dr. Anya Crichton is a busy forensic physician who has branched out into freelance pathology, serving as liaison and expert witness in court cases. There is a lot of detail about the various labs, morgues, police units etc. which might have been interesting when this was written in 2005, but I found it pedantic. Over the years we have been inundated with corpse autopsies and dissections by shows like CSI and novels from authors like Kathy Reichs, and if you are reading this kind of book, it's nothing new. Women are being abducted and then found dead later by suicide - all have strange fibres in their lungs. Remember, this is a mystery where the organs are laid out before the ribcage separation. Anya works closely with police officer Kate Farrar, who eventually gets involved more than she would have liked.
Guess what, there is a brilliant sociopathic psychopath behind it all.
Despite the side story of a Muslim family whose daughter ran away and overdosed on drugs, this was very uninvolving. The investigation was so dry that I lost interest. I didn't care about any of the characters. Couple this with yet another mystery based on women in parking lots being abducted, trapped in specially built torture chambers by a deranged madman (which by this time we have seen so many times it's actually boring), and a villain you can identify from their first appearance. The wave of Nordic authors over the past ten years have dulled our senses, trying to surpass each other in the capture/torture game that this seemed generic as opposed to scary or tense. Another girl caught by a psychopath. Even if you are into this theme, I've read enough of these to say there are better novels to choose. Patricia Cornwell became the queen of forensics when this genre began to take off, and her Kay Scarpetta series is just more exciting.
2005 / Paperback / 468 pages
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