Patricia Cornwell

Patricia Cornwell, born Patricia Carroll Daniels in Miami on 9 June 1956, is an American crime novelist. She reported on crime for The Charlotte Observer, then worked from 1985 to 1991 as a technical writer and computer analyst at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of Virginia — the world her fiction grew out of. Postmortem (1990) introduced the medical examiner Kay Scarpetta and took the Edgar, John Creasey, Anthony and Macavity awards in the same year; the series now runs to thirty novels, the latest, Rapid and Fatal, due in January 2027. She also writes the Andy Brazil and Judy Hammer novels, the Win Garano books and the Captain Calli Chase thrillers, and two works of non-fiction naming Walter Sickert as Jack the Ripper: Portrait of a Killer (2002) and Ripper (2017).