Port Mortuary

By PATRICIA CORNWELL

RRP: $39.99, TPB, Little, Brown

In the latest in the internationally bestselling forensic detective series, Dr Kay Scarpetta is confronted with a case that could shut down her new facility and ruin her personally and professionally.

We travel back to the beginning of Scarpetta's professional career, when she enlisted in the Air Force to pay off her medical school debt and found herself ensnared in a gruesome case of what seemed to be vicious, racially motivated hate crimes against two Americans in South Africa. Now, more than twenty years and many career successes later, her secret military ties have drawn her to Dover Air Force Base, where she has been immersed in a training fellowship to master the art of CT-assisted virtual autopsy, a procedure the White House has mandated that she introduce in the private sector. As the chief of the new Cambridge Forensic Center in Massachusetts, a joint venture of the state and federal governments and MIT, Scarpetta is confronted with a case that could ruin everything. A young man drops dead, apparently from a cardiac arrhythmia, eerily close to Scarpetta's new Cambridge home. But when his body is examined the next morning, there are stunning indications that he may have been alive when he was zipped inside a pouch and locked insider the Center's cooler.

About the Author

Patricia Cornwell is the 2008 winner of the Galaxy British Book Awards' Books Direct Crime Thriller of the Year - the first American ever to win this prestigious award. Postmortem was the only novel to win five major crime awards in a single year and Cruel and Unusual won the coveted Gold Dagger Award in 1993. Her books are translated into thirty-six languages across more than fifty countries.

Patricia Cornwell has often been praised for her meticulous research and an insistence on accuracy in every detail, especially in forensic medicine and police procedures. She is so committed to verisimilitude that, among other accomplishments, she became a helicopter pilot and a certified scuba diver and qualified for a motorcycle license because she was writing about characters who were doing these things. ‘It is important to me to live in the world I write about,’ she said. ‘If I want a character to do or know something, I want to do or know the same thing.’

In Port Mortuary, Patricia Cornwell brings Scarpetta together with Marino, Benton, and Lucy in an intimate way that is reminiscent of the early novels, and we welcome a voice we haven't heard in years. 

See www.patriciacornwell.com for more information about the author.

These bestselling books will finally be brought to the big screen by Twentieth Century Fox, with Angelina Jolie confirmed for the lead role of Dr Kay Scarpetta.
 

Published 1st Dec 2010

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