Patricia Cornwell

"It is important to me to live in the world I write about," says Patricia Cornwell. "If I want a character to do or know something, I want to do or know the same thing." The award-winning former crime reporter for the Charlotte Observer spent six years working for the Virginia Chief Medical Examiner's Office and as a volunteer police officer before she wrote her first Dr. Kay Scarpetta novel, Postmortem. It received outstanding international acclaim and made her the only author ever to win five major mystery awards in a single year on both sides of the Atlantic for a first novel. Eleven subsequent Scarpetta novels became international bestsellers, together with Food to Die For and Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper- Case Closed. She is a graduate of Davidson College in North Carolina and she is also the author of three police procedural novels and A Time for Remembering, the biography of Ruth Graham, wife of the evangelist. She supports several institutions that are concerned with forensic research, victims' support, and animal rescue.