Unnatural Exposure (novel)

Infobox Book |
name = Unnatural Exposure
title_orig =
translator =


image_caption =
author = Patricia Cornwell
illustrator =
cover_artist =
country = United States of America
language = English
series = Kay Scarpetta
genre = Crime fiction
publisher = Sphere
release_date = 1997
media_type = Print (hardcover, paperback)
pages = 370
isbn = 978-0-7515-3049-0
preceded_by = Cause of Death
followed_by = Point of Origin

"Unnatural Exposure" is a crime fiction novel by Patricia Cornwell. It is the eighth book in the Dr. Kay Scarpetta series.

Plot summary

Virginia Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta has a bloody puzzle on her hands: five headless, limbless cadavers in Ireland, plus four similar victims in a landfill back home. Is a serial butcher loose in Virginia? That's what the panicked public thinks, thanks to a local TV reporter who got the leaked news Scarpetta's rival, Investigator Percy Ring. But this is no run-of-the-mill serial killer. A shadowy figure has plans involving mutant smallpox, mass murder, and messing with Scarpetta's mind by e-mailing her gory photos of the murder scenes, along with cryptic AOL chat-room messages.

Characters in "Unnatural Exposure"

*"Kay Scarpetta" - Chief Medical Examiner
*"Benton Wesley" - FBI Profiler. Head of the Child Abduction Serial Killer Unit.
*"Lucy Farinelli" - "Kay's" niece, an FBI agent
*"Pete Marino" - Commander of the Richmond Police Department's homicide squad.
*"Dr Phyllis Crowder" - English microbiologist at the Medical College of Virginia

Victims

*"Five Unidentified victims in Dublin, Ireland" - Their spines cut horizontally through the caudal aspect of the fifth cervical vertebral body. Arms and legs severed through the joints. Victims are a racial mix, estimated ages between eighteen and thirty-five. Heads and limbs were never found, and all were discovered in private landfills." [Unnatural Exposure, p.3.]
*"Four Unidentified victims in Virginia" - Modus operandi of killer same as Dublin cases. Varied races. [Unnatural Exposure, p.4.]
*"Unidentified White Female" - Aged sixty-five to eighty. She was decapitated low on the cervical spine, arms and legs severed. She had been dismembered by cutting straight through the strong bones of the humerus and femur. [Unnatural Exposure, p.26.] Probably hit in the head that resulted in a basilar skull fracture. [Unnatural Exposure, p.60.]

Major themes

* The hunt for a killer.

Allusions/references to actual history, geography and current science

* The story is set in Richmond, Virginia and Ireland.
* Central to the plot is the case of Janet Parker, the last person known to have died of smallpox, which she contracted in 1978 due to a lab accident in Birmingham, England, after the disease was eradicated in the wild. Cornwell makes the villain a junior employee of the lab at the time who was made a scapegoat for the accident and whose career was blighted as a result. This provides the plot with a credible source for the virus and a motive for the central crime.

Notes

External links

[http://www.patriciacornwell.com/ Author's Official Website]