My Last Precinct

I usually turn my nose up to mass-market paperback fiction -- you know, the type advertised on subway cars. I got through about 8 pages of "The Da Vinci Code" before I put it down in disgust.

But I recently purchased a copy of "The Last Precinct," by Patricia Cornwell, for two reasons.

One, I felt I needed to bone up on my crime/mystery writing.

Second, because of this weird and very vivid dream I had.

It featured a copy of the Bible -- my Bible -- with the words "Patricia Cornwell" on it in gilt letters. A voice said, "this is your true story."

So I randomly chose a Cornwell paperback at the bookstore, and purchased it along with a book on FBI profiling and the basics of spycraft. (I'm pretty serious about adding more "meat" to my writing)

I am halfway finished with reading "The Last Precinct," and am hooked. But the book's subject matter -- or rather, the subject matter that keeps reappearing, reasserting itself in different permutations -- has struck a nerve.

The book opens with the aftermath of an attack on a woman's life. She survives, and actually got an opportunity to hurt her assailant. But the tables are turned on her and she becomes the criminal, the suspected. Her life gets turned upside down, whereas her attacker sits pretty (or ugly) in the jail, being fed junk food and soft drinks. She was the one who was attacked, yet she finds herself constantly on the defensive.

Underlying this is the fear of some male characters of strong women, giving some a motive to destroy the objects of their hate (whether physically with a hammer to the face, or career-wise).

One character says,

"Righter thinks you're a nut case, I hate to tell you. And I gotta add that he don't like you personally and never has because he's got the balls of a soprano and don't like powerful women."

The main character, Kay Scarpetta, is not the only female in the novel to face this sort of resistance and persecution. Her niece is in the process of being "run out" of the ATF -- for being both a woman and particularly a lesbian. And a similar thing has happened to her partner, Teun.

And sexual harassment -- even by "well meaning" male characters, also features prominently.

While the outward battlefield in "The Last Precinct" is played out in court rooms and medical examiner's offices, there is another battle -- that against high-achieving women in mostly male institutions.

The solution -- at least at this point in the story -- is to quit those institutions and create a new place. A place where women can work without the barriers, the suspicion, the hatred of who they are. The Last Precinct.

I'm at the part of the story where Kay -- suspected of a murder she didn't commit, slandered, betrayed -- tenders her resignation to the governor. It is a hard decision for her. But she's had enough.

"I have lost this city. I can't go back. I can blame it on Chandonne, but that isn't all of it, if I am honest with myself. It is time to do the harder thing. Change."