Patricia Cornwell (born June 9, 1956) is the author of a popular series of crime novels featuring the fictional heroine "Dr. Kay Scarpetta", who is a medical examiner for a Virginia police department.

Contents

1 Biographical information 2 Her writing 3 Controversies 3.1 Jack the Ripper 3.2 Litigation surrounding The Last Precinct 4 List of works 5 External links

Biographical information

She was born Patricia Daniels in Miami, Florida. Her ex-husband is Charles Cornwell. She is a descendant of Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Cornwell, a multi-millionaire, has made several notable charitable acts, including funding scholarships to the University of Tennessee's National Forensics Academy and donating her collection of Walter Sickert paintings to Harvard University.

Her writing

The Scarpetta novels include a great deal of detail on forensics. The solution to the mystery usually is found in the forensic investigation of the murder victim's corpse, although Scarpetta does considerably more field investigation and confrontation with suspects than real-life medical examiners. The novels are considered to have influenced the development of popular TV series on forensics, both fictional, such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, and documentaries, such as Cold Case Squad.

Procedural details are part of the allure of her novels. Cornwell herself worked at a crime lab in Virginia as a technical writer and computer analyst but not in any official medical or forensics capacity. Her attempts to portray herself as an expert in those fields have caused some bad feelings from those who have actual training and licensing, including Kathy Reichs, who is both a board-certified forensic anthropologist and a crime novelist.

Controversies

Jack the Ripper

Cornwell has been involved in a continuing, self-financed search for evidence to support her theory that painter Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper. She published Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper - Case Closed in 2002 to much controversy, especially within the British art world, where Sickert's work is admired, and also among Ripperologists, who criticize her methods and conclusions. See Portrait of a Killer for further information.

Litigation surrounding The Last Precinct

In 2000, Cornwell successfully obtained a preliminary injunction against a Dr. Leslie Sachs, who had been making claims on the Internet that Cornwell's then-forthcoming novel, The Last Precinct, was plagiarized from his own book, The Virginia Ghost Murders. Reports by neutral observers indicate that the resemblance between the two works, if any, is extremely weak and certainly coincidental.

Sachs failed to comply with the injunction, fled the country, and continued his Internet-based campaign of harassment against Cornwell.

List of works

• Scarpetta's Winter Table
• Cruel and Unusual
• The Body Farm
• Food to Die For
• Postmortem
• A Time for Remembering
• The Last Precinct
• Point of Origin
• Unnatural Exposure
• Cause of Death
• From Potter's Field
• All That Remains
• Body of Evidence
• Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper - Case Closed (non-fiction)
• Blow Fly
• Trace

External links

• Summaries of the novels (http://www.nucleus.com/~steve/nancy/pcornwell.htm)
• www.patriciacornwell.com
• A link to CORPSE: (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0738207713/qid=1037817882/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2/102-4860107-2320159?v=glance&s=books) a nonfiction account of the actual "body farm" made famous by Cornwell's novel of the same name.

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