Grief and Coping Mechanisms
In addition to the themes of social justice and betrayal of the public welfare, Cornwell explores the nature and effects of grief. At the close of the previous novel in this series, Point of Origin (1998), Benton Wesley, Dr. Kay Scarpetta's lover, fiance, and friend, was tortured, mutilated, and slaughtered by a maniacal serial killer who literally stole the faces of his victims as trophies that confirmed his power (twenty-seven faces were found at his residence). Black Notice explores the different ways in which characters deal with their grief for Benton.
Scarpetta, as the chief medical examiner for Virginia, buries herself in her duties, working long hours and driving herself to exhaustion. The novel begins with a missive from the dead, a letter Benton wrote Scarpetta and left with a friend (Senator Frank Lord) to be delivered a year from his death (during the Christmas holidays). Therein, Benton describes behavior that Scarpetta's associates confirm later in the novel: her rejection of the usual consolations of family and friends, and instead her half-life existence as a workaholic, racing to crime scenes, doing more autopsies than ever, being consumed by her duties to the court, by lecturing, running an institute, and with whatever else she can fill her days and nights. Benton writes that he knows she will avoid the well-meant solicitude of her neighbors, worry about her niece Lucy, get irritated with Marino, and in general opt out of life. Benton's postmortem advice is for her to stop dodging the pain, to take comfort from her memories of their life together, and, in a more practical vein, to invite Marino and Lucy to dinner and to talk openly about their shared loss, a topic they have avoided since Benton's death. Following Benton's targeted advice leads Scarpetta to the discoveries on which the novel turns: unknown associates have been using her grief to their advantage—to taint her public and private image and to undercut the credibility of her office.
Her niece Lucy has blamed herself for Benton's death because the murderer had once been her lesbian lover, and Scarpetta must help her understand that Lucy herself was the targeted prey from the very start of the relationship and that she was in no way to blame for the nightmare acts of a very clever but insane killer. Lucy expresses her grief by a disturbing disdain for her own life and a fascination with guns and other weapons of destruction; she volunteers for dangerous missions (the most recent against the crime organization run by the Chandonne family) and employs deadly force that endangers her life and career and the life of her partner. At the novel's close she must decide whether to ruin her prospects by an unnecessary kill or revel in the self-destructive violence that reflects her sense of personal responsibility for Benton's death.
Marino handles his grief in yet another way, with tough-guy cynicism that seeks conspiracies, including the possibility that Benton is still alive, on a secret mission, and using his death as misdirection to prevent detection. He is irritable and antagonistic, and takes pride in pushing his image as an out-of-date dinosaur. In France, when he realizes Scarpetta has spent the night with their Interpol contact, he explodes in anger, attacking Scarpetta for betraying Benton's memory. He starts a brawl in the hotel lobby, trying to punch out everyone within arm's length until Scarpetta helps him see that he is doing exactly what Lucy was doing—using violent confrontation as a way of striking out against the universe for the unfair death of the man who was Scarpetta's lover and...
(This entire section contains 609 words.)
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friend, Lucy's father figure, and Marino's best buddy.
Violence and Crime
Cornwell also uses her medical examiner sleuth to comment on the spread of violence in America, the growing need for international connections between law enforcement officers as killers move rapidly from state to state and country to country, and the superiority of the American investigatory system's reliance on forensic evidence. In Black Notice, the first victim shows up in a cargo container shipped from Europe, and the evidence ties in the psychopathic son of the rich and influential Parisian family Lucy has been investigating indirectly through a Florida sting operation against their crime organization. The French system has been unable or unwilling to identify their serial murderer, and now his violence spills over into Richmond, Virginia, Scarpetta's hometown.
Technology and Manipulation
The Internet proves a major tool for criminals in Cornwell's novels. Here, someone has broken into Scarpetta's e-mail system and has rudely or insidiously answered messages she knew nothing about—messages from friends, associates, superiors, and fellow investigators—rejecting invitations, turning down opportunities to comfort the families of victims, alienating all, and creating the illusion of nervous exhaustion. Someone has also set up an online chat room that features expert medical commentary mixed with inept, uncaring advice, both in Scarpetta's name, an embarrassing fraud that suggests she is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Those who know her (like her long-time secretary, Rose) assume her unwillingness to deal with problems and her supposed extreme statements online are a measure of her grief, and they try even harder to protect her from herself. But when Scarpetta finds out, she realizes someone is out to undermine her authority, to reduce the power of her investigative office, and to injure those closest to her as well. Memos marked private and confidential have never arrived, and Scarpetta begins to realize that a nasty scenario is at work: someone wants her out of her office so it will be vulnerable to takeover by Public Safety, the division that Bray has her eye on for her next step up the political rungs.
Forensic Science and Justice
Through Scarpetta, Cornwell asserts the rights of the dead and the respect due them; her detailed descriptions of autopsy results, of what the medical evidence reveals about the suffering of the victims and of the effects of violent assault, and of the nature and acts of the murderer speak eloquently for the dead and for the need for official retribution. Her descriptions of the meticulous steps taken by the coroner's office to protect forensic evidence; to find trace elements, fingerprints, chemicals, and fibers; to do DNA testing and profiling; and to provide the police a modus operandi for identifying the criminal confirms the importance of this office in any fair investigation. In addition to the physical evidence recovery kit (PERK), the Halliburton aluminum scene case, lasers, Luma-Lite (which uses fiber optics to detect body fluids, drugs, fingerprints, and trace evidence not evident to the naked eye), and the support of criminalists, forensic psychiatrists, forensic pathologists, and computer programs for accessing police, FBI, and Interpol files, Cornwell makes clear that Scarpetta must also bring to her investigation and analysis personal experience and an almost paranoid awareness of the political ramifications of her medico-legal investigation of death. This combination of disciplined scientific techniques and intuitive analysis of the results and their personal, political, and judicial ramifications brings-to life a profession normally dismissed as morbid by the general population.
Psychopathy and Deviance
Furthermore, Cornwell captures, to some extent, the convoluted dynamics of psychopaths, though she is less interested in the psychopath in this novel than in the political conflicts. In the Scarpetta series, her villains are frequently murderous deviants who kill again and again in hideous ways, like those depicted by Thomas Harris in Manhunter (1981) and Silence of the Lambs (1988). They are clever, inventive, and demented. They stalk their prey using the Internet, police radios, or whatever tools they can acquire. They revel in blood and slaughter. Benton, whose presence is inescapable in this novel despite his death, was a criminal profiler whose psychological training enabled him to interpret forensic evidence and predict the patterns and psychoses of serial killers. With his death, Scarpetta is missing an essential part of her detection team and has greater difficulty intuiting where the killer she seeks will strike next. Perhaps this is one reason her Chandonne "werewolf" killer never comes to life as a malignant personality and seems as much offended against as offending, a twisted, pathetic freak of nature.
