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| ![Patricia Cornell's <i loading=]() Post Mortem" border="0" height="164" width="237" src="/radio4/arts/media/frontrow_cornwell.jpg" />Patricia Corwnell's Post Mortem | |     | | MONDAY NIGHT
* In the last ten years Patricia Cornwell has become the highest paid woman writer in the world and one of the best selling writers of any kind.
Her success comes from 11 novels including Post Mortem, The Body Farm and Unnatural Exposure, all featuring Dr Kay Scarpetta an Italian-American Chief Medical Examiner, the term used in the US for a pathologist, working in Richmond Virginia. The books draw on Cornwell’s experiences first as a crime reporter then as a computer technician in a Medical Examiner's office.
Scarpetta is effectively a detective whose clients just happen to be dead, taking cases in which violent death regularly threatens her and those around her, including her niece Lucy, an FBI agent. More recently and, to far less approval from critics and readers, Cornwell has started a parallel series of comedy crime novels featuring Virginia State Trooper Andy Brazil, of which the most recent is Isle of Dogs published in paperback next month.
In earlier interviews the novelists Stephen King and PD James said they had seen a dead body at a key stage of their development as writers. We asked Patricia Cornwell if she had had a similar experience.
Isle of Dogs - is published next month by Little Brown.
Listen to the interview
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