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A review by paulabrandon
Malicious Intent by Kathryn Fox
2.0
When forensic physician Dr. Anya Crichton accepts a private job to uncover the circumstances behind the drug overdose death of a young Muslim woman, she is shocked to find similarities between that death and several other women's deaths. They all went missing for a period of time before their bodies were found, and the autopsies reveals a strange fibre in their lungs. Anya works with her friend Det. Kate Farrer to determine whether a cunning killer is at work.
I enjoy a good forensic thriller (it's why I read Kathy Reichs and Patricia Cornwell), and I was interested in reading an Australian version! I have actually read Skin And Bone by this author, which was part of this series, but didn't feature Anya Crichton at all! It features Kate Farrer, and was a pretty standard police procedural. This forensic thriller had the germ of a good idea, and the crimes were disturbing...but it was mostly dull. The focus here is on Anya trying to find out exactly what those fibres in the lungs of the victims were. I mean, zzzzz....
The book gets bogged down with too much extraneous material. Anya provides expert witness testimony at a court case. She attends a conference on how to be a good expert witness. She's in a messy divorce where she only has infrequent custody of her son. She's haunted by her past, in which she blames herself for the disappearance of her three-year-old sister many years ago, a crime that was never solved. All this only serves to dilute the potentially scary and disturbing central premise.
I wasn't fully convinced by Anya's custody situation. The courts granted full-time access to her unemployed husband? It didn't ring true. They would be more likely to grant access to the parent with a paying job and able to afford childcare if necessary. And the newspaper hatchet job committed against Anya later in the book frustrated the hell out of me. I hate vindictive journalist subplots in books like this! Plus, the said article would never be published! It's just asking for a lawsuit!
This had the beginnings of a decent forensic thriller, but got bogged down with too much extraneous detail that kept dragging me out of the plot. The killer's identity was extremely obvious too. I picked them from the moment they were introduced!
I enjoy a good forensic thriller (it's why I read Kathy Reichs and Patricia Cornwell), and I was interested in reading an Australian version! I have actually read Skin And Bone by this author, which was part of this series, but didn't feature Anya Crichton at all! It features Kate Farrer, and was a pretty standard police procedural. This forensic thriller had the germ of a good idea, and the crimes were disturbing...but it was mostly dull. The focus here is on Anya trying to find out exactly what those fibres in the lungs of the victims were. I mean, zzzzz....
The book gets bogged down with too much extraneous material. Anya provides expert witness testimony at a court case. She attends a conference on how to be a good expert witness. She's in a messy divorce where she only has infrequent custody of her son. She's haunted by her past, in which she blames herself for the disappearance of her three-year-old sister many years ago, a crime that was never solved. All this only serves to dilute the potentially scary and disturbing central premise.
I wasn't fully convinced by Anya's custody situation. The courts granted full-time access to her unemployed husband? It didn't ring true. They would be more likely to grant access to the parent with a paying job and able to afford childcare if necessary. And the newspaper hatchet job committed against Anya later in the book frustrated the hell out of me. I hate vindictive journalist subplots in books like this! Plus, the said article would never be published! It's just asking for a lawsuit!
This had the beginnings of a decent forensic thriller, but got bogged down with too much extraneous detail that kept dragging me out of the plot. The killer's identity was extremely obvious too. I picked them from the moment they were introduced!