Detective-fiction author Patricia Cornwell has enjoyed enormous success and built a fanatical fan base with her Kay Scarpetta novels, an absorbing series which combines the fascinating nuts and bolts of forensic medicine with good, solid adventure plotting. With Hornet's Nest, Cornwell breaks with her established storylines to give us a police procedural. Andy Brazil is a crime-beat writer for The Charlotte Observer who wants to ride and work side by side with patrolling officers. He finds himself at odds with Deputy Chief Virginia West, who harbors the traditional cop's hatred of journalists. What happens next is, disappointingly, a bit predictable. Cornwell can't seem to pull off a standard cop story, falling victim to cliches which she should have outgrown by now. Her characters are heroic by the classic definition: They try so hard to be good at what they do that it leads to their downfall, coming off as self-important, tiresome and a little too perfect in the process. Even the action is standard gritty-city fare, equally recognizable to pulp readers and TV movie fans. Those rabid fans of Cornwell's past work will buy it in droves, of course, but more gourmandizing readers should pick up her vastly superior first seven mysteries and let CBS adapt Hornet's Nest.