How long does it take to read The Body Farm?
The Body Farm by Patricia Cornwell takes about 7 hours 6 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
Book 5 of Kay Scarpetta
Previous: Cruel and Unusual Next: From Potter's Field
About 7 hours 6 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1994. 387 pages, about 106,425 words.
15 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 11 hours 50 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 7 hours 6 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 4 hours 26 minutes |
The page count is the median across 57 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Little Emily Steiner is dead. She left a North Carolina church meeting late one October afternoon and strolled along a lakeside path toward her house two miles away. Who met her on the path? Who followed her home, kidnapped her from her bedroom, and left her body by the lake days later? It's a puzzling and terrifying crime, reminiscent of the work of serial killer Temple Gault, who has long eluded Dr. Kay Scarpetta and the FBI's Investigative Support Unit in Quantico, Virginia, where Scarpetta consults as a forensic pathologist. At the request of the North Carolina authorities, Scarpetta and her colleagues, Benton Wesley and Pete Marino, fly to the mountains near Asheville to assist. They find a mother in mourning and an investigation in disarray. It's particularly frustrating to work a homicide after the fact. An inexperienced pathologist missed or misinterpreted some of the evidence, leaving Scarpetta with inconclusive medical and laboratory reports, and photographs that only raise questions. What, for instance, is the strange mark on the child's body that causes Scarpetta to plead with a reluctant judge for an exhumation? What is the meaning of trace evidence from a plant not indigenous to the Carolinas? And where did the killer obtain the unique blaze-orange duct tape, with which he bound Emily and her mother? Most puzzling of all is the question of when Emily died. She disappeared the night of October 1. Her nude body was found a week later. Scarpetta's obsession with time leads her to The Body Farm, a little-known research facility in Tennessee where, with the help of some grisly experiments, she might discover the answer. It is Scarpetta alone who can interpret the forensic hieroglyphics that eventually reveal a solution to the case as staggering as it is horrifying. Scarpetta not only must search for a killer, she must endeavor to help her niece Lucy, who is accused of espionage while interning at the FBI's highly classified Engineering and Research…
Subjects: Fiction, Kay Scarpetta (Fictitious character), Medical examiners (Law), Women, Women detectives, Women physicians
