The Kay Scarpetta Chronicles

Categories: Mystery & Suspense , Fiction

If you're on John Grisham therapy, you might want to alternate that with Patricia Cornwell therapy; for one thing, it's very convenient just to turn around from the Grisham books, walk a few feet, and hit the Cornwells.

Cornwell has written other books--notably Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper--Case Closed, a controversial nonfiction book claiming to discover Jack the Ripper's identity--but she's best known for her Kay Scarpetta mystery series.  So far, there are fourteen of them, and apparently a fifteenth will appear in 2006.  It's important to read them in order, beginning with the 1990 Postmortem, because the characters in the books refer to events in previous books and age in something vaguely like real time.  (Scarpetta's niece Lucy starts out at 10 and is by now probably about 26.) 

Scarpetta and Lucy (when she grows up) change jobs and lovers a lot and sometimes get fired, but they're always successful in capturing truly repellent serial killers, usually because of Scarpetta's forensic skills (for awhile, she's chief medical examiner of the State of Virginia). 

Indeed, unless you want to go up to Education and Religion and read through the true-crime section, you may find Cornwell to be the queen of serial-killer creators.  My guess is that Scarpetta will end up with oafish but loyal detective Pete Marino by the end of the series.

Cornwell has her own Web Site, and the most interesting part is the videos that allow Net surfers to obvserve crime scenes and take a quiz to learn whether the investigators and pathologists are following correct police procedure.

You can read about her personal life here.