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Scarpetta, for the uninitiated -- and surely by now there can't be many -- is Chief Medical Examiner for the state of Virginia. She is also a consultant for the FBI, a sometime teacher at the University, and a thoroughly lovable woman who always seems to be in trouble.
This time Scarpetta is house-sitting for Dr. Philip Mant, her deputy chief medical examiner. The house is in the dunes, and it is bitterly cold on New Year's eve.
She gets a call about a death in the inactive naval shipyard on the Elizabeth River. It is a diving fatality, and the victim is a Ted Eddings, an award-winning investigative reporter for the Associated Press. Scarpetta can't imagine anyone diving for anything in the Elizabeth River, certainly not Civil War relics as someone surmised, for the river is so murky that visibility is about a foot.
What could Eddings have been looking for? During the subsequent autopsy it appears the reporter was poisoned with cyanide gas. Why was he killed? Thus begins the strangest chapter in Scarpetta's life, for soon she is pushed into a morass of evil, starting when her tires and those of her niece -- who came to the dunes to visit -- are slashed.
Later, the young man returning her car after installing new tires is found dead. More and more she begins to suspect that somebody thinks she knows something that she doesn't.
For Scarpetta, strange things continue, and she is drawn into a swamp of unbelievable happenings, far beyond anything she has experienced before as a medical examiner. Her life, as well as the lives of her niece and others around her, fall under the shadow of a frightening unknown.
It will be difficult for readers to put Cause of Death down without finishing it -- the book generates a kind of hypnosis as the suspense builds.
Lloyd Armour is a retired newspaper editor.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.