Thursday 29 March 2018

Patricia Cornwell Books and Life

Read on to learn about Patricia Cornwell's Books, and her life.

Crime novelist Patricia Cornwell is best known for her series of books featuring her forensic pathologist character, Dr Kay Scarpetti.

They were popular even before the current public obsession with forensic detective work.

We suggest that you watch out video as a great way to see our article, but don't forget to return here and SCROLL ON for more info, about the great Patricia!

Her reputation has been enhanced by the number of crime writing awards, Patricia Cornwell books have won, including the Edgar Award and the Sherlock Award and Gold Dagger Award in the UK.  Cornwell has been very open about her medical problems.

She suffered from anorexia and depression when she was young and has had substance abuse problems as an adult.

Cornwell was born in 1956 in Miami and graduated from college with an English degree. The detail and accuracy apparent in Patricia Cornwell books is borne from experience, starting with her job as a crime reporter for a newspaper in North Carolina.

She then took a position in a crime lab in Virginia as a technical writer and computer analyist. Her writing career began with her first Scarpetti novel, Postmortem in 1990, a story about a serial killer, which was very well received.

Another Scarpetti novel, From Potters Field, was made into a movie. Most of the novels are based in Richmond, Virginia.

Image of Patricia Cornwell to illustrate this article.

In addition to crime writing, Cornwell has written a biography of Ruth Bell Graham, her friend and wife of evangelist, the Reverend Billy Graham. It was titled Ruth, A Portrait: the Story of Ruth Bell Graham and was published in 1983.

A series of three police stories, featuring the character of Andy Brazil, have also appeared and these are much lighter in tone. Patricia Cornwell books are nothing if not versatile and she has also produced cookery books containing Italian recipes.

The feted writer has courted controversy in her long campaign to convince people that Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper.

She has spent a lot of her own money gathering items to support her case that the celebrated British artist was responsible for the murders committed by the Ripper, who was never caught, in Victorian London.

This campaign has met with criticism and she put her theories into a book called Portrait of a Killer. Jack the Ripper: Case Closed.

She even took the step of placing a full page advertisement in two British newspapers to answer her critics.

Of all the Patricia Cornwell books, it is this one that has not been universally praised and a lot of her theory seems to depend on unsubstantiated evidence.

Patricia Cornwell is a Senior Fellow at the International Crime Scene Academy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, a founder of the Virginia Institiute of Forensic Science and Medicine and a member of the Harvard affiliated McLean Hospital's national Council, where she is an advocate for psychiatric research.

She is the 2008 winner of the Galaxy British Books Awards' Books Direct Crime Thriller of the Year - the first American ever to win this prestigious award.

Her most recent number one bestsellers include:

  • Scarpetta; Book of the Dead; 
  • The Front and Portrait of a Killer; 
  • Jack the Ripper - Cased Closed. 

Her earlier works include

  • Postmortem - the only novel to win five major crime awards in a single year - and 
  • Cruel and Unusual, which won the coveted Gold Dagger Award in 1993. via PCornwellDB


Patricia Cornwell is an American fiction crime writer. She was written thirty seven books, including fiction, non-fiction, and a children’s book. She has sold over 100 million copies of her books. She has written many series, including the Doctor Kay Scarpetta books about a female medical examiner for Virginia. Other series include the Andy Brazil and Judy Hammer series, the Win Garano series, and an Omnibus that refers to the Scarpetta novels.

She has written a total of twenty four New York Times Best Sellers. She sold her first book Postmortem while she was working as a computer analyst at Virginia’s medical examination offices. Cornwell was born on June 9, 1956 in Miami.

Her father left the family when she was just five years old. Her mother subsequently was hospitalised for depression in 1961. Cornwell went with her two brothers Jim and John into foster care, growing up in Montreal, North Carolina.

Cornwell struggled herself with depression in addition to anorexia nervosa.

She attended King College in Tennessee before graduating from Davidson College with a Bachelor of the Arts in English. via CornwellBookSeries

Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert

Patricia Cornwell has a theory. The wildly successful author of the Kay Scarpetta mystery series believes she's figured out, once and for all, the true identity of the 19th century serial killer known as Jack the Ripper.
Cornwell explored this topic in her 2002 book, Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper, Case Closed, arguing that the Ripper was, in fact, the celebrated British painter Walter Sickert. She was widely ridiculed; one critic wrote, “Portrait of a Killer is a sloppy book, insulting to both its target and its audience. The only way for Cornwell to repair its damage will be to stay with this case.”

Regrettably, she has.

Cornwell's new book, Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert (Thomas & Mercer, 497 pp., a revised and expanded edition of Portrait, attempts to convince her sceptics that the case she closed is a closed case.

“One of many frustrations in this investigation,” Cornwell writes, “is having very little evidence of where (Sickert) was or what he was doing during any given day, week, month, or year.”

To a responsible investigator such a vacuum might seem like an insurmountable problem, but for Cornwell it’s more like an opportunity — she invents an elaborate, completely nonsensical narrative to fill it, and asks readers to suspend disbelief to come along for the ride. via PCornwellRipperReboot

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