My grandmother and I have passed along several book recommendations to each other, sometimes lending the other books we've just finished reading. Here, I'll review a book she recently recommended to me.


"All That Remains: a Scarpetta Novel" by Patricia Daniels Cornwell follows Dr. Kay Scarpetta as she tries to track down the person who has murdered the daughter of an up-and-coming Washingtonian and her boyfriend. Their deaths mirror those of several other couples, and Scarpetta works to link them together and figure out who is responsible for the crimes.

The action and suspense in the book kept me reading. I often made my way through 100 pages without realizing that I had been sitting still for that long. But I also found that the book occasionally seemed to drag. I take issue with romantic subplots in action stories that are seemingly put in there to entertain the women but to me are just distractions and wasted space that could be used to further the plot.

The end of the book had a plot twist ... sort of. I think it was supposed to, but it seemed to me like the idea was just thrown in without enough pages to explain why. I couldn't figure out the point of inserting the twist that late in the story, and it made me leave the book on a sort of bad note.

Overall, Grandma, this book was fine for its suspense, but I don't know if I would recommend it, nor read it again.


--Cheryl Sadler
CSadler@News-Herald.com