Red Mist is the 19th book in the Kay Scarpetta series by American author, Patricia D. Cornwell. Forensic pathologist, Kay Scarpetta visits an inmate at the Georgia Prison For Women, a woman who sexually assaulted Scarpettas now-deceased deputy chief, Jack Fielding, in his youth, and bore his daughter, who herself became a brilliant and vicious murderess. As a result of the visit, Kay feels manipulated into meeting with former NY assistant DA, Jaime Berger, and her paranoia is justified as she finds herself re-examining a nine-year-old multiple slaying in Savannah. While the plot in this Scarpetta instalment is very good, the execution suffers from excessive trivial detail. It is written as a first person narrative with an abundance of repetition as well as bits of menu, food commentary, and preachy nutritional advice interspersed. The narrator comes across as whiny, arrogant and quite paranoid. The remaining significant characters are flat (the reader has met them in previous books and Cornwell apparently deems no depth is required of these characters now). Astute readers will pick the most important clue in the first tenth of the book, but the exact who, how and why of it make, nonetheless, a good read. If the heroine was less abrasive, the other characters a little less stale and the story condensed from the 500 pages it takes to cover 48 hours, this would be an excellent read.