Unnatural Exposure [Perfect Paperback]

Patricia Cornwell (Author)

Product Details

• Perfect Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: G. P. Putnam's Sons; 1 edition (1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0748109692
• ISBN-13: 978-0748109692
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (270 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,876,318 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Patricia Cornwell was born on June 9, 1956, in Miami, Florida, and grew up in Montreat, North Carolina.

Following graduation from Davidson College in 1979, she began working at the Charlotte Observer, rapidly advancing from listing television programs to writing feature articles to covering the police beat. She won an investigative reporting award from the North Carolina Press Association for a series of articles on prostitution and crime in downtown Charlotte.

Her award-winning biography of Ruth Bell Graham, A Time for Remembering, was published in 1983. From 1984 to 1990, she worked as a technical writer and a computer analyst at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Richmond, Virginia.

Cornwell's first crime novel, Postmortem, was published by Scribner's in 1990. Initially rejected by seven major publishing houses, it became the first novel to win the Edgar, Creasey, Anthony, and Macavity Awards as well as the French Prix du Roman d'Aventure in a single year. In Postmortem, Cornwell introduced Dr. Kay Scarpetta as the intrepid Chief Medical Examiner of the Commonwealth of Virginia. In 1999, Dr. Scarpetta herself won the Sherlock Award for best detective created by an American author.

Following the success of her first novel, Cornwell has written a series of bestsellers featuring Kay Scarpetta, her detective sidekick Pete Marino and her brilliant and unpredictable niece, Lucy Farinelli, including: Body of Evidence (1991); All That Remains (1992); Cruel and Unusual (1993), which won Britain's prestigious Gold Dagger Award for the year's best crime novel; The Body Farm (1994); From Potter's Field (1995); Cause of Death (1996); Unnatural Exposure (1997); Point of Origin (1998); Black Notice (1999); The Last Precinct (2000); Blow Fly (2003); Trace (2004); Predator (2005); Book of the Dead (2007), which won the 2008 Galaxy British Book Awards' Books Direct Crime Thriller of the Year, making Cornwell the first American ever to win this award; Scarpetta (2008); The Scarpetta Factor (2009); and Port Mortuary (2010). In 2011 Cornwell was awarded the Medal of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters, one of France's most prestigious awards to honor those who have distinguished themselves in the domains of art or literature, or by their contribution to the development of culture in France and throughout the world.

In addition to the Scarpetta novels, she has written three best-selling books featuring Andy Brazil: Hornet's Nest (1996), Southern Cross (1998) and Isle of Dogs (2001); two cook books: Scarpetta's Winter Table (1998) and Food to Die For (2001); and a children's book: Life's Little Fable (1999). In 1997, Cornwell updated A Time for Remembering, which was reissued as Ruth, A Portrait: The Story of Ruth Bell Graham. Intrigued by Scotland Yard's John Grieve's observation that no one had ever tried to use modern forensic evidence to solve the murders committed by Jack the Ripper, Cornwell began her own investigation of the serial killer's crimes. In Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper--Case Closed (2002), she narrates her discovery of compelling evidence to indict the famous artist Walter Sickert as the Ripper.

In January 2006, the New York Times Magazine began a 15-week serialization of At Risk, featuring Massachusetts State Police investigator Win Garano and his boss, district attorney Monique Lamont. Its sequel, The Front, was serialized in the London Times in the spring of 2008. Both novellas were subsequently published as books and promptly optioned for adaptation by Lifetime Television Network, starring Daniel Sunjata and Andie MacDowell. The films made their debut in April 2010.

In April 2009, Fox acquired the film rights to the Scarpetta novels, featuring Angelina Jolie as Dr. Kay Scarpetta. Cornwell herself wrote and co-produced the movie ATF for ABC.

Often interviewed on national television as a forensic consultant, Cornwell is a founder of the Virginia Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine, a founding member of the National Forensic Academy, a member of the Advisory Board for the Forensic Sciences Training Program at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, NYC, and a member of the Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital's National Council, where she is an advocate for psychiatric research. She is also well known for her philanthropic contributions to animal rescue and criminal justice, as well as endowing college scholarships and promoting the cause of literacy on the national scene. Some of her projects include the establishment of an ICU at Cornell's Animal Hospital, the archaeological excavation of Jamestown and the scientific study of the Confederacy's submarine H.L. Hunley. Most recently, she donated a million dollars to Harvard's Fogg Museum to establish a chair in inorganic science.

Cornwell's books have been translated into 36 languages across more than 50 countries, and she is regarded as one of the major international best-selling authors. Her novels are praised for their 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 often says. "If I want a character to do or know something, I want to do or know the same thing."

Visit the author's website at: www.patriciacornwell.com

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars ANOTHER KAY SCARPETTA MYSTERY..., October 1, 2002

By 

Lawyeraau (Balmoral Castle) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Unnatural Exposure (Kay Scarpetta) (Paperback)

This is a somewhat interesting, Dr. Kay Scarpetta mystery, replete with its usual attention to forensic detail, as well as a myriad of subplots. Though not her best novel, it still manages to entertain the reader.

Once again, Dr. Scarpetta, Chief Medical Examiner, finds herself on the hunt for a serial killer, when the body of an elderly, dismembered woman is discovered in a Virginia landfill. Moreover, a mutated, high tech, variant small pox virus appears to be on the loose, and Dr. Scarpetta finds herself receiving taunting emails from the alleged killer, signing as "deadoc". Couple all this with an overly ambitious and unscrupulous law enforcement agent named Percy Ring who arrests an obviously innocent man for the elderly woman's death, and the reader has an intriguing mystery to unravel.

Homicide Detective Pete Marino is pivotol to the success of this book. His relationship and repartee with Dr. Scarpetta contribute to many of the book's highlights, and it is he who gives dimension to the book, as he is simply a wonderful, down to earth character. Dr. Scarpetta's relationship with FBI Agent Wesley Benton is less memorable, as he is on the periphery of the story, for the most part, though in the end he provides closure for the torch Dr. Scarpetta was carrying for her ex-lover, Mark.

The only real fly in the ointment, however, is the continued appearance of Dr. Scarpetta's niece, Lucy, who is an obnoxious character. In the real world, Lucy would not be allowed to hold the position of responsibility that she does in the book, due to her compete immaturity. She is a loose cannon waitng to misfire at any moment. It flies in the face of her professionalism that Dr. Scarpetta seems unable to fathom this, but blood is thicker than water.

The ending is somewhat surprising, though in retrospect, the clues are, in fact, there for the reader to discern the identity of the killer. The problem is that the resolution occurs almost too abruptly, as if the author had only a limited number of pages in which to wrap it all up. While the book moves somewhat slowly for the most part, the last few chapters move at lightning speed. A better editing job may have helped make this book into a more cohesive, better written mystery. Still, Kay Scarpetta fans will find something to enjoy in this offering.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Misses the mark, July 31, 2000

By 

Todd P. Last "rubatoguy" (Portland, OR, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Unnatural Exposure (Kay Scarpetta) (Paperback)

I've been a fan of Patricia' Cornwell's books for some time, and this one just not up to her usual level of quality.

The book has a wonderfully interesting idea regarding the MO of the killer, but dissapointingly, this idea along with the character of the killer, is not really developed to the extent that you expect from earlier Cornwell novels.

Most of the book revolves around sub-plots of the relationships between the many characters that have become part of Kay Scarpett's life over the series of Novels. Unfortunately this comes at the expense of the story about the villain and the crimes.

My preference is for the earlier, leaner, Kay Scarpetta books that concentrate on the murder mystery, the science of forensics, and the interplay between Marino and Kay.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A forensic thriller!, December 20, 2005

By 

chriscaglegirl83 "chriscaglegirl83" (Texas) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Unnatural Exposure (Kay Scarpetta) (Paperback)

Virginia's chief medical examiner, Kay Scarpetta, is trapped in a nightmare of unsolved murders and a pernicious virus in this breathless thriller, where clues are elusive and the killer's threats are hurled through cyberspace.

Dr. Kay Scarpetta is newly returned from Dublin, where she was called in to examine the remains of a murder victim whose limbs and head were expertly severed--a signature of a cunning serial killer on the loose again after an eight-year sabbatical--when the same killer apparently strikes again, this time much closer to home to Scarpetta. The remains of a woman are found in a Virginia landfill, her body dismembered in the same expert way as in the Dublin case. After Scarpetta investigates the murder scene, the killer boldly contacts her through the Internet, inviting her to download photos of the murder victim and signing off with a chilling screen name: deadoc.

Scarpetta soon discovers inconsistencies between this new case and the serial murders she has been investigating. With the help of her niece, Lucy, and FBI computer expert, she takes an extraordinary virtual tour of the background of the e-mailed photo. But even as Scarpetta and Lucy probe illuminating details in virtual relaity, local authorities try to wrap up the case by charging the man who discovered the body. When Scarpetta determines that the victim was exposed to a rare smallpox-like virus before she died and, later, that herself may have been infected, she realizes that she is up against a killer with access to an incredible sophisticated arsenal of deadly force--a killer with a specific animus directed toward her.

Packed with unrelieved tension and constant surprises, Unnatural Exposure is the case of Kay Scarpetta's life--and a triumph for Patrica Cornwell.

I loved this book because of the high tension throughout and the attention paid to forensic details. Cornwell is defintely an author who just seems to get better and better.