[In the following excerpt, Champlin discusses Cornwell's use of scientific detail in The Body Farm, as well as the difficulties her female characters seem to have in maintaining romantic relationships.]

In The Body Farm Patricia Cornwell extends the adventures of Dr. Kay Scarpetta, Richmond's medical examiner, currently on detached service to lend the FBI some forensic know-how. A child in a remote North Carolina hill town has been brutally murdered, possibly by a serial killer named Gault, who narrowly eluded Scarpetta once before.

No one can accuse Cornwell of skimping on illustrative detail. This is probably the grisliest of the five Scarpetta novels, including an exhumation. The farm of the title is the University of Tennessee's Decay Research Facility, which works on cadavers to yield ways of determining times of death with ever-greater accuracy—an important crime-solving tool.

More than putrefaction is afoot, however. The murder is not quite as it seems; Scarpetta's old cop pal Marino is an emotional mess, and Scarpetta's difficult niece Lucy is working computers at the FBI's Quantico center, where Scarpetta, like Cornwell, spends a lot of time. Lucy, seduced and betrayed by another woman, provides a peculiarly affecting subplot to the search for the child-killer.

Lucy's woes suggest that Cornwell is airing some of her own feelings about the difficulties of being a strong woman in a man's world. Her few lovers, Scarpetta muses, had been formidable but sensitive men, who could accept that “I was the body and sensibilities of a woman with the power and drive of a man.” None of the new breed of women sleuths have said it more succinctly.

The new book is not least an anthem to the FBI, which Cornwell indicates has come a far piece from J. Edgar Hoover. For all its gamy images, Cornwell again makes forensics engrossing if occasionally bewildering. “If she drowned,” Scarpetta says crisply, “there should be edema fluid in the alveolar spaces with disproportionate autolytic change of the respiratory epithelium.” The same thought occurred to me.

But at last the piling up of microscopic facts, and the Holmesian deductions they trigger, help build uncommon suspense and tension. Cornwell knows her stuff, alveolar spaces but the soul as well, and how to make a story. The ending leaves a mystery solved, but threads remain that will lead to another novel, I'm sure.