Patricia Cornwell has spent much of her career in the morgue. She’s traipsed through body farms of decomposing corpses. She tattooed a turkey from the grocery store to see how it would fade post-mortem.
The author of the Kay Scarpetta novels is known for embedding herself in forensics for research, but this time she’s giving her own life an autopsy.
If you wondered the kind of mental fortitude it takes to spend all day with violent crime, real and imaginary, her memoir might be your answer. “True Crime” (out now from Grand Central Publishing) traces the author’s emotionally turbulent childhood to a stint as a police reporter to the heights of her thriller writing career.
Cornwell’s mother suffered from psychotic depressive episodes that sent her to a psychiatric facility while Cornwell and her brothers lived with an abusive foster family. From a young age, Cornwell learned from her mother that the world was unsafe. “She was always anticipating what might injure or kill us,” she writes.
Life would confirm this on many occasions for Cornwell. She reveals she was molested at age 5 and later raped and drugged by a police officer in early adulthood. She writes TV and radio host Larry King forced her hand onto his crotch during a flight.
