EACH time I read a new Patricia Cornwell novel I get a feeling of deja vu then I realise the lady is writing to a formula, well tried and successful, but a formula for all that. First, we get loads of medical and forensic expertise from heroine Dr Kay Scarpetta, Chief Medical Officer for the State of Virginia: "He lined a bucket with a viscera bag"; "I swiftly made the Y incision, the blade running from shoulders to sternum to pelvis"; "I'll check the brain for petechial haemorrhages, and look at the soft tissue of the mediastinum for extra alveolar air"; and so on, ad infinitum.

Then Scarpetta's niece Lucy, a trainee FBI agent, comes on the scene and we are dealt more technical information to do with computer speak, surveillance hardware, listening devices and weapons. We are told how and where to procure cyanide. It's used to extract gold from ore. It's also used in metal plating, and as a fumigant, and to manufacture phosphoric acid from bones."

Captain Pete Marino of the Virginia Police Department is Scarpetta's friend, so police lore is never at a premium. A nuclear reactor is taken over by a fascist group called the New Zionists, of course we are treated to discourses on the workings of the reactor and of right wing cabals. There's a robot called Toto, a handy lesson on how to dive into dark water at night, and a short course on how to poison someone who happens to be underwater.

So what of the plot, and does it manage to stay afloat under the weight of all the cutting edge technology? Well, plot has never been Cornwell's greatest strength - in most of her books the villain is someone who is introduced in the last 20 pages or so, and is as peripheral to the narrative as a wooden leg is to an autopsy. In this latest offering, the action is compressed into less than the obligatory last 20 pages, as Scarpetta, Marino, Lucy and a legion of FBI suits wind up the story, capture the villains and save Virginia from nuclear fall out, all in the length of, by my count, a mere 12 pages.

There have to be murders, of course, and the book kicks off with the killing of investigative reporter Ted Eddings in a disused naval shipyard. It soon becomes apparent that he was sticking his nose into the affairs of the aforementioned New Zionists, led by their charismatic leader, Joel Hand - we have to take it on faith that he is charismatic because by the time he appears he is at death's door and unable to raise as much as a whimper.

Soon another death occurs, this time of Scarpetta's assistant, Danny Webster - this is another characteristic of Cornwell's novels, the number of her staff who have met violent deaths. The lady herself, Scarpetta, is also threatened, abused by a lowly detective who may or may not be in league with the fascists, and, quite incredibly, flies off to London with her would be lover, Benton Wesley of the FBI, at the height of the crisis in order to find yet another member of her team who has absconded across the sea.

The relationship between the good doctor and her lesbian niece, Lucy, is also a bit worrisome. At times it appears to be falling over into heated lubricity - Lucy herself even mentions incest at one point. Then there is the fat and balding Marino, who may possibly entertain designs on more than Scarpetta's expertise in cutting up dead bodies. All in all, our protagonist has more than enough on her hands to fill quite a lot more books, and as long as they sell in their millions, then who can blame her, and her creator?