Quantum

I will admit that I actually read this whole book, because it was morbidly fascinating -- in the same way that watching a slow-motion train wreck is so fascinating that you can't bring yourself to look away, in utter disbelief as it crashes and burns.

Back in the day, I read probably the first 8 Scarpetta novels before finally admitting that their quality had gone greatly downhill as the series progressed, and I gave up on the series. That was many years ago, so I was curious to see what the author would do with a science fiction novel.

It's immediately clear that this novel is ghostwritten -- very badly ghostwritten. It bears no resemblance to the prose style of the author's early novels, is composed largely of sentence fragments, and meanders hopelessly along for 340 pages of scattered internal monologue by the main character.

Apart from some vaguely futuristic gadgetry, there is no science fiction here. This is yet another police procedural with an absolutely unbelievable plot. The main character is supposedly a polymath and a genius -- but fails to check the access record for a stolen security access card, while continuously stressing out over a period of more than 30 hours what that card might have been used for. The main character, and her twin sister, are suppposedly in the astronaut program, but they are both such an absolute psychological mess and so incredibly unprofessional that they would have washed out on the psych testing before ever being accepted to the program.

The worst part about this book is that there's no ending. It just