Patricia Cornwell is an American bestselling crime writer best known for creating forensic pathologist Dr. Kay Scarpetta. Born in Miami in 1956, Cornwell worked as a police reporter and later spent six years at Virginia’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, experiences that gave her fiction its distinctive forensic realism. Her debut novel, Postmortem (1990), launched the long-running Scarpetta series and earned an extraordinary collection of major crime-fiction awards. Cornwell’s emphasis on forensic science helped reshape modern crime fiction, and she has also written nonfiction exploring subjects including Ruth Bell Graham and the Jack the Ripper murders.