Red Mist by Patricia Cornwell

Red Mist by Patricia Cornwell 

The first half of the book is tediously chatty. Endless rounds of guarded, double-meaning conversations, where Kay verbally conquers a variety of foes--a female warden, a prisoner, and Jaime Berger, a character that Cornwell must enjoy writing about, but has always seemed like an overdone mirror image of Scarpetta. Tension builds. There's a death.

The second half of the book is about an old murder, a cold case that's entangled with people we met and endlessly yacked with in the first half. And the very end of the book feels tacked on, as if Cornwell wrote and wrote (with no editing), then realised she didn't have to write much more to finish the thing. So she ties everything up, lickety split.