Patricia Cornwell

Patricia Cornwell (born 1956) is an American crime novelist whose forensic thrillers about the medical examiner Dr Kay Scarpetta, beginning with Postmortem in 1990, have sold more than 120 million copies.

She was born Patricia Carroll Daniels on 9 June 1956 in Miami, Florida, and grew up in Montreat, North Carolina. After an English degree from Davidson College in 1979 she worked at The Charlotte Observer, moving from television listings to the police beat. She then joined the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of Virginia in Richmond, first as a technical writer and then as a computer analyst, and wrote Postmortem while working there.

Three earlier novels were rejected before Postmortem appeared in 1990. It became the first book to win the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, the John Creasey award, the Anthony, the Macavity and France's Prix du Roman d'Aventure in a single year. The Scarpetta series has continued with Body of Evidence (1991), All That Remains (1992), The Body Farm (1994), From Potter's Field (1995), Cause of Death (1996), The Last Precinct (2000) and more than twenty later books, most recently Sharp Force (2025). She has also written the Andy Brazil, Win Garano and Captain Chase series and non-fiction, including Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper, Case Closed (2002). Her books appear in 36 languages.

For collectors. The key book is the first edition of Postmortem, published in hardback by Scribner in New York in 1990. By her own account she sold no copies at her first signing, held during a lunch break from the morgue.