Gilbert Cruz

Thank you so much for joining the Book Review Podcast.

Coming up after the break, my conversation with best-selling crime fiction writer, Tricia Cornwell.

Patricia Cornwell is best known for her series of books featuring the character Kay Scarpetta, a forensic pathologist and chief medical examiner.

The series launched with the book Postmortem in 1990, and it was one of the first crime novels to make forensic science an integral part of the story.

That book went on to win all five major crime fiction awards in a single year, the first book to ever do that.

Over the next few decades, Cornwell expanded the story of Scarpetta across almost 30 books.

The series has sold millions of copies, and just this spring, Amazon Prime adapted the story for a new TV series starring Nicole Kidman.

But Cornwell's extraordinary success did not come easy.

It almost never does.

And she documents her remarkable journey in a new memoir, True Crime.

And when we talked, she said that she knew exactly where to start the story.

You go into great detail describing how terrible this foster mother was.

I don't necessarily want to go into those details here.

At one point, they're doing you and your family a favor.

At the other point, she sounds just like an absolutely terrible person.

But it was something that needed to be done at the time because your mother had to go into a hospital.

Yeah.

You talk about meeting Ruth Graham at this very young age.

And then you talk about many years later, as you say, it's the spring of 1976.

You write that it's a turning point in your life.