Patricia Cornwell

Patricia Cornwell (born Patricia Carroll Daniels on June 9, 1956) is an American author of crime fiction, best known for her series about medical examiner Kay Scarpetta. Her books have sold over 120 million copies. The stories are known for their focus on forensic science, a focus that later influenced how police work is portrayed on television. Cornwell has also claimed that the artist Walter Sickert was the Jack the Ripper killer, but most experts on the case disagree, and strong evidence indicates Sickert was outside the UK for most of 1888, when the murders occurred.

Cornwell is a descendant of Harriet Beecher Stowe. She was born in Miami, Florida, the second of three children of Marilyn and Sam Daniels. Her father was a prominent appellate lawyer and a former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black. Cornwell has said that emotional abuse from her father shaped her life; he left the family on Christmas Day 1961. She recalls a final hospital visit where he grabbed her brother’s hand but only wrote “How’s work?” on a legal pad for her. After the separation, her mother moved the family to Montreat, North Carolina. Ruth Bell Graham, wife of evangelist Billy Graham, helped arrange for Cornwell and her brothers to be raised by Lenore and Manfred Saunders. Marilyn Daniels was hospitalized for severe depression. Graham became a mentor and encouraged Cornwell’s writing. A bright student, cartoonist, and tennis player, Cornwell briefly attended King College before transferring to Davidson College, where she earned a B.A. in English in 1979.

She started her career in 1979 as a reporter for *The Charlotte Observer*, editing TV listings, then moving to features and crime reporting. In 1980, she won the North Carolina Press Association’s Investigative Reporting Award for a series on prostitution. She left the paper in 1981 after marrying Charles Cornwell and moving to Richmond, Virginia. That year, she began a biography of Ruth Bell Graham, *A Time for Remembering*, published in 1983. It won a Gold Medallion Book Award in 1985 but damaged her friendship with Graham—they didn’t speak for eight years. In 1984, Cornwell started her first novel, about a male detective named Joe Constable, and met Dr. Marcella Farinelli Fierro, a Richmond medical examiner who would inspire Kay Scarpetta. She worked for six years in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of Virginia, first as a technical writer, then as a computer analyst, and also volunteered with the Richmond Police Department. After three rejected novels, her first Scarpetta book, *Postmortem*, was published in 1990. Based on real stranglings in Richmond in 1987, it won the British John Creasey Award, the French Prix du Roman d’Aventure, and the American Edgar Award for Best First Novel.

The Scarpetta novels are filled with forensic detail. The initial solution to the mystery usually comes from examining the victim’s body, though Scarpetta does more fieldwork and face-to-face confrontation with suspects than real medical examiners would. The books often end with action scenes where Scarpetta and her team confront the killer, who is usually killed. The series is credited with influencing TV shows about forensics, both fictional (like *CSI: Crime Scene Investigation*) and documentary (like *Cold Case Files*). Other themes include health, safety, food, family, and the sexual self-discovery of Scarpetta’s niece. Conflicts and secret manipulations among colleagues often complicate the cases. While the stories take place in various U.S. and international locations, they center on Richmond, Virginia. The series has two major style shifts: from *The Last Precinct* (2000), the tense changed from past to present; from *Blow Fly* (2003), the point of view shifted from first person to third person omniscient, even showing the killers’ perspectives. Cornwell returned to first person in *Port Mortuary* (2010). A Scarpetta TV series premiered on Amazon Prime Video.