SCARPETTA
Patricia Cornwell
Little, Brown, £18.99

'NO ONE is better than Cornwell," trumpets Scarpetta's cover, at inexplicably drawing the reader into a world comprising vaginal swabs and blood stains. Famed for her frank approach to the crime scene, no Miss Marple delicacies here, Cornwell's latest, and hotly awaited title in the Scarpetta series ("3 days, 20 hours, 36 minutes 9 seconds," her website brays at the time of writing) won't disappoint those fixated by her schtick.

We find Dr Kay Scarpetta recovering from the death of her beloved friend and secretary Rose. Benton, the "professionally inseparable" husband, acts as mediator to draw her into a crime scene in New York involving the gruesome death of achondroplastic – a dwarf to you and me – Terri Bridges. Muscularly hairless and similarly statured boyfriend Oscar Bane is the chief suspect in an oddly clueless crime.

Forensic psychologist Benton identifies paranoia in Oscar, uncomfortably heightened by his demand – the presence of Kay Scarpetta – before he will deign to divulge anything pertaining to his involvement. Cast as the 'midget murderer', the case is high-profile, and the more so as soon as CNN specialist Scarpetta is hauled into the breach. Through the eyes of her old crime partner Marino, we contextualise Kay as she is now: married, based in Massachusetts with a beautiful New York apartment, and 'really famous', which helps explain the prurient fascination with her personal life which manifests itself in a posting on an ugly online rag, Gotham Gotcha, administrated, somewhat implausibly, by ageing widow and plot hinge Eva Peebles.

If Cornwell is strong on plot twists and forensic specifics, one might allow oneself to contest her perception in the realm of personal relationships. There are only faint glimmers of Scarpetta the human, for instance, in her final conversation with Rose. Otherwise she continues to be an infallible, stony, ruthlessly toned, ageless femme fatale, just as niece Lucy is a Lara Croft-esque wunderkind, and DA Jaime Berger is just a sleek hairdo, a no-nonsense tongue and a failed marriage. Even the oddly likeable Marino is your typical New Jersey cop, with a penchant for booze and sassy women.

We expect many twists and turns at the hands of Patricia Cornwell, and Scarpetta offers no different. We keep turning pages because she snaps our attention away exactly when we least want her to. She dwells upon one scene, infuses it with high drama, and immediately shifts the dramatic gear, a frustrating but successful mode of storytelling. With an impersonal third person narrative device throughout, we are privy to the same flash of time as realised by someone else seminal to the whole plot.

Set as it is in a modern world of "white collar crime, stalking, identity theft", it is not only Oscar who should be afraid, but Scarpetta herself. As her work on the slab is rendered more explicitly, with abrasions, contusions and incidents of sexual garrotting lovingly dwelt upon, the more unwelcome exposure Scarpetta has heaped upon her. In a fragmented real time span of only a few sleep-deprived days, which rail back to related crimes of years ago, as well as emotions which have never been resolved, Cornwell taps proficiently into the climate of fear induced by technology: Oscar is vigilant against mind-tracking though Lucy uses her computer skills for good.

Cornwell seems the Ian Fleming of crime and Scarpetta her Bond – saturated not only with forensics, but also with techno-speak, gadgets, brands and expense, everything is impeccably au courant: iPhones, Blackberries, Hillary and Obama. She channels the zeitgeist; in a world where a wife can ditch her husband for cosying up with another 'woman' in a computer game, the issues she raises concerning the cyber universe and reality have never been more worryingly tangible. Countering people in various stages of 'desolate straits', in her informed, didactic and far-reaching way, Cornwell none the less serves up a bloated corporeal mass of dialogic prose, and tops it all off with neat, plot-securing sutures. Unashamedly cresting the wave of adoration provided by a hardened fan-base for whom "Scarpetta is a huge celebration, a party (she's] thrown just for you", she does a fine line in stolid smugness and manages to over-bleach the franchise. Not to linger upon those oft-mentioned swabs, but here's a 'party' on which you might care to pass.