Patricia Cornwell | Biography, Books, & Facts (2024)

Patricia Cornwell (born June 9, 1956, Miami, Florida, U.S.) is an American crime writer best known for her best-selling series featuring the medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta.

Daniels’s father deserted the family when she was five years old. Several years later her depressed mother attempted to give the girl away to neighbours, the Baptist evangelist Billy Graham and his wife, Ruth. Daniels stayed with friends of the Grahams while her mother recovered from a nervous breakdown. These childhood experiences left their mark. During her years at Davidson College (B.A., 1979) in North Carolina, she fought eating disorders and was admitted for a brief stay in a mental hospital. She married one of her professors, Charles Cornwell, in 1979. (The couple divorced a decade later.) After graduating she took a job as a police reporter for the Charlotte Observer.

Because her career brought her into close contact with many aspects of crime, she strove to understand all the intricacies and facets of criminal behaviour. She interviewed medical examiners, volunteered as a police officer, spent endless hours in the morgue’s medical library, and took classes in forensic science at the police academy. She also worked at the office of the chief medical examiner in Richmond, Virginia, where she was allowed to observe autopsies.

Cornwell’s first book, A Time for Remembering (1983), was a biography of Ruth Graham, who had served as a surrogate mother. Cornwell, having developed what she called a “healthy respect for evil” while working for the Observer, made the focus of her second book crime. Her first three essays in the crime novel genre had been rejected by publishers, but she was encouraged by one editor to develop the fictional character of Kay Scarpetta, who had appeared in minor roles in the early attempts. Scarpetta—much like Cornwell in appearance and ideology and seemingly a self-portrait—was featured as a medical examiner in Postmortem (1990), and with this book Cornwell’s writing career was launched. The series continued with such books as Body of Evidence (1991), All That Remains (1992), Cause of Death (1996), Black Notice (1999), Blow Fly (2003), Book of the Dead (2007), Scarpetta (2008), The Scarpetta Factor (2009), Port Mortuary (2010), Red Mist (2011), The Bone Bed (2012), Dust (2013), Chaos (2016), and Autopsy (2021). Early efforts in the series maintained a first-person voice, allowing the reader insight into the mind of the preternaturally observant Scarpetta. Several later novels employed third-person narration. Cornwell used the latter approach to explore the disturbed minds of her heroine’s quarries but eventually returned to using Scarpetta’s perspective alone. The novels developed an intense following, selling more than 100 million copies.

Cornwell also wrote several other series. In the Andy Brazil books—which included Hornet’s Nest (1997), Southern Cross (1999), and Isle of Dogs (2001)—law enforcement officers are the central characters. The Captain Chase series, which began with Quantum (2019), features a female protagonist who is a NASA pilot, quantum physicist, and cybercrime investigator. The second installment, Spin, was published in 2020. Cornwell’s other works included a children’s book (Life’s Little Fable, 1999) and a work of nonfiction (Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper—Case Closed, 2002). The latter book controversially posits the artist Walter Sickert as the fiendish killer.