Patricia Cornwell

Many authors, maybe even most authors, labor in obscurity for months or years before finally hitting it big with a bestseller . But Patricia Cornwell hit it big with her very first book, Post Mortem in 1990. And in the three decades since then, she has sold over 100 million books. Her wildly popular mysteries feature a medical examiner named Dr. Kay Scarpetta. Cornwell based the character loosely on a real life medical examiner for whom she worked briefly in the 1980s. I first interviewed Patricia Cornwell when Post Mortem was published. The interview you're about to hear is our second interview, a year later, when her second book, Body of Evidence was published.