Red Mist

Red Mist is the nineteenth Kay Scarpetta novel from Patricia Cornwell, published in 2011. The Scarpetta series is one of the longest running and most influential franchises in modern American crime fiction, with Cornwell having essentially invented the modern forensic procedural with her 1990 debut Postmortem. By this entry, the cumulative Scarpetta universe is dense with returning cast members, ongoing personal storylines, and the institutional history that comes with twenty plus years of fictional career.

In this novel, Kay Scarpetta travels to Savannah, Georgia, to meet with the imprisoned Kathleen Lawler, the former lover of the serial killer Jean Baptiste Chandonne and the mother of the woman who murdered Scarpetta’s surrogate niece Lucy’s lover several books earlier. Kathleen has information that may finally provide some of the answers that have been driving Scarpetta and her family across multiple novels in the series. The visit to the Georgia prison is the first event in a chain that pulls Scarpetta back into the long Chandonne family history that has been one of the most disturbing recurring threads across the wider series.

What Cornwell does in her late series novels is balance the procedural mystery with the ongoing personal storylines that have developed across decades of books. The Chandonne material in particular has been a presence in the Scarpetta books for many entries, with the various extended family members of the original killer continuing to surface in ways that affect Scarpetta, her husband Benton Wesley, her niece Lucy, and her longtime friend and police investigator Pete Marino. Red Mist advances several of these threads while also delivering the contained case that the individual book requires.

Cornwell’s prose in the late series novels has continued to evolve, with the first person Scarpetta voice developing across the books in ways that some readers have appreciated and others have found uneven. Red Mist is one of the entries that engages most directly with the wider Chandonne arc, and longtime readers who have been following that storyline will find significant payoff here.

For longtime Scarpetta fans, Red Mist is essential. For new readers, the novel is densely connected enough to the wider series that starting earlier in the franchise gives the strongest sense of the relationships and the running plots.