“Unnatural Exposure” opens with Kay Scarpetta investigating the possible link between murders in Dublin, Ireland and Richmond, Virginia. She is increasingly suspicious that Ireland’s serial dismemberments from ten years ago are the work of the same individual they’re dealing with at home.

When the butchered corpse of an elderly woman is found in a landfill, law enforcement intuits the killer has struck again. But further examination suggests not; and when Scarpetta uncovers a pattern of pustules on the body’s torso, followed by a visit to a death scene on Tangier Island, where a woman has died of smallpox, it becomes clear she is up against an even deadlier threat — one that has Scarpetta firmly in their sights, as they leave sinister computer messages under the name ‘deaddoc.’

Seven novels deep into my Kay Scarpetta reading marathon I’m starting to feel like a broken record, because so much of what I feel works and does not work in “Cause of Death” has been enumerated previously.

This is my favourite kind of crime novel, which begins with one dead body, and explodes into something far more spectacular and far-reaching. The corpse is investigative reporter Ted Eddings, who died — or was killed — during an unauthorised dive in an inactive Naval shipyard. The opening pages are some of Cornwell’s most atmospheric, as Chief Medical Examiner Scarpetta dons a wetsuit, and dives into pitch-black waters alongside a Navy SEAL rescue squad to examine the body.