Scarpetta has a secret.
Thirty-four years and twenty-seven books after Patricia Cornwell first introduced medical examiner Kay Scarpetta in Postmortem, she’s still discovering the vestiges of her character’s past—and sharing them with a legion of eager readers around the world who’ve bought more than 100 million copies of her novels.
“It gives us a richness,” Cornwell says, “because it gives us an opportunity to explore more things about her background.”
In Identity Unknown (October 8, 2024; Grand Central Publishing), Scarpetta is called to a truly baffling crime scene, the victim a long-ago lover with whom she once spent an amorous summer in Rome.
“How would she deal with it when this person who is found dead … is somebody she once had a very intense romantic relationship with at the very beginning of her career?” Cornwell muses. “That is what she’s confronted with when she sees his body.”
This premise has its origins in the author’s own past. After covering the crime beat (among other things) for the Charlotte Observer, Cornwell took a job at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of Virginia, where she worked as both a technical writer and computer analyst.
“Back in those days, when I was in that environment, one of the things that always struck me as incredibly poignant and almost unimaginable was when a body came through and it was somebody you knew,” she says.
This happened to Cornwell herself in the mid-80s. She heard a radio report about a homicide cop who committed suicide only to discover upon her arrival at work that it was the detective she used to do weekend ride-alongs with as a volunteer police officer.
“I’ll never forget looking at him and seeing that teeny, tiny bullet hole in his chest that caused so much devastation for everybody around him,” Cornwell recalls. “But even harder than that is the medical examiner who is going to do the autopsy of someone that they had a relationship with.”
This is just what Scarpetta faces in Identity Unknown—though the circumstances of the victim’s death can’t be confused for anything but murder.
Astrophysicist Sal Giordano—known as the ET Whisperer for his interest in the paranormal—is found dead in an abandoned Wizard of Oz amusement park, his broken body splayed along the yellow brick road that traverses an apple orchard.
“I’ve always thought that the whole notion of The Wizard of Oz is such a wonderful metaphor,” Cornwell says, crediting its enduring popularity, in part, to L. Frank Baum’s having tapped into something bigger than the story itself. “To me, it’s very much like finding yourself landing on this planet and wondering … Why are we here? Who are we?”
The peculiarities of the crime scene lead Scarpetta down a similar path of pondering. Giordano’s skin is inexplicably tinted red, and he is surrounded by a crop circle made of petals. According to Scarpetta’s niece, high-tech, helicopter-piloting Lucy Farinelli, his body was dropped out of the sky by a UAP—or an Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (more commonly known as a UFO). The implications are … otherworldly.
“I wasn’t all that interested in UFOs or the possibility of an extraterrestrial community or non-human intelligence that might be here on this planet with us,” Cornwell says, noting that her curiosity was only piqued when she began researching the Captain Chase novels (Quantum and Spin) at NASA in 2017. “But the more I started looking into things, the more I started to wonder.”
Her interest led her to the National Museum of Health and Medicine, where pathology specimens are kept (including a piece of Abraham Lincoln’s skull as well as the bullet that killed him). After being granted entry into a private storage area, Cornwell noticed a file drawer that was taped shut and labeled with warnings not to open. It was marked: Roswell. The curator attempted to pass it off as a joke; Cornwell wasn’t convinced.
“I have never forgotten that. And I have Scarpetta going through something similar,” Cornwell says of her character’s long-ago discovery of a Roswell file, albeit at Langley Air Force Base (where Scarpetta is summoned to perform Giordano’s autopsy). “She’s in a top-secret area where we see some very unusual things. And all I can say is, I had a lot of fun with that scene.”
Less fun for Scarpetta is her command performance before an audience that includes members of the CIA, Military, and Secret Service, as well as Lucy, Scarpetta’s husband, forensic psychologist Benton Wesley, and her longtime investigator, Pete Marino. It’s an unenviable task made more so by the fact that her personal life is exposed to professional probing.
“They get into the relationship Scarpetta had with the victim,” Cornwell notes. “They have to, partly to make sure that she is objective.”
And objectivity is more important than ever given the high stakes of Identity Unknown. As chief medical examiner, Scarpetta mustn’t allow emotion to cloud her judgment; rather, her opinions are supposed to be rendered solely on what the scientific evidence tells her. But Giordano’s death coupled with that of seven-year-old Luna Briley—whose short life ended with a bullet through the head, reported by her prominent parents as accidentally self-inflicted—has her in a tailspin.
Ryder and Piper Briley are billionaires who use their money to garner power and wield influence. They also happen to own the shuttered amusement park where Giordano’s body was found, suggesting a link between the cases. Not surprisingly, Scarpetta wants them put under the proverbial microscope and exposed to the same scrutiny as the victim(s)—even as they use every resource at their disposal (not to mention intimidation and harassment) to have the case closed.
“She might judge people about being willfully cruel or being willfully dishonest or taking advantage. It’s really about the abuse of power,” Cornwell says. “And she would judge you mostly on your intentions and on your heart because she knows that’s what matters to her. Scarpetta could not live with being unkind, and that’s what makes her wonderful. It’s also what gets her into trouble.”
That trouble has only grown larger in scale since Cornwell relaunched the series with 2021’s Autopsy after a five-year hiatus. That book introduced the idea of postmortem examinations performed in space while its follow-up, Livid, explored modern weaponry such as so-called microwave guns. But last year’s Unnatural Death moved into more speculative territory with an inquiry into the Bigfoot phenomenon while Identity Uknown grapples with things that are truly out of this world.
“I often think, if you want to know the truth about who we are, look at what we’re doing,” Cornwell says, citing efforts to preserve DNA samples of animals and plants in portable data banks—a theoretical repopulation project commonly known as Noah’s Ark. “If we are thinking of having interplanetary travel … if we are considering creating communities on the moon and Mars … then what makes you think that hasn’t been done somewhere else?”
Of course, Cornwell also sees evidence of ethereal, mind-boggling creation—such as the “infinitely meticulous” ladybug or dragonfly—all around her.
“Nature is masterfully designed, and we’re learning from it,” she marvels, giving the example of how researchers studied the flight capabilities of falcons in the development of aircraft such as stealth bombers. “That tells me there’s something beyond us, and I find that exciting and hopeful.”
It’s this exhilaration at life’s infinite possibilities—especially amid the devastation of COVID and the senselessness of human carnage—that drew Cornwell back to the familiarity of Scarpetta.
“Trust me, if I didn’t believe in something greater … I wouldn’t have the courage to sit down and do this all the time because I’d find life hopeless,” she says. “But I don’t find life hopeless. Part of what I’m trying to tell you in these stories is that we can do better than this. We can be better than this.”
But this transcension to betterness requires a willingness to look both beyond and behind us; after all, where there is hurt (or haunt), there can also be healing. It’s a notion the author will continue to examine through Scarpetta’s wise, wonderous eyes.
“The big thing that I’m curious about right now is the whole subject of ghosts,” Cornwell teases. “I’ve been doing some very interesting research, and you just may see something rather haunted in the next book. That’s what’s got me full of wonder.”
And therein may lie the secret to Cornwell’s longevity—and Scarpetta’s: “Always have a seeking mind.”
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Note: Scarpetta—having been under option for television and/or film since her inception—will finally make her small screen debut in a series for Amazon’s Prime Video, which recently picked up the project for two seasons. Nicole Kidman and Jamie Lee Curtis will co-star and executive produce.
“I’m very, very pleased about it, and I’m honored and thrilled by the talent that has been attached to it,” says Cornwell. “What I’ll tell my readers—and this is very important—is that you should not expect that this is going to be what you imagine from having read a Scarpetta book … You’re going to see other things about the characters that will be new and different. And I think it’s going to be a really good time.”
–Author photo by Patrick Ecclesine
