Postmortem

Postmortem is Patricia Cornwell's 1990 debut novel, the first Kay Scarpetta forensic-pathology thriller and the book that essentially invented the modern forensic-thriller subgenre. Dr. Kay Scarpetta, the chief medical examiner for the Commonwealth of Virginia, is working a string of four murders in Richmond. The pattern is clear: young professional women strangled in their homes by a killer who climbs through windows after midnight. The pattern is too clear, and the Bureau is starting to wonder if the killer is reading the crime-scene reports.

Cornwell wrote Postmortem after six years as a computer analyst at the Virginia Chief Medical Examiner's office, and the procedural texture is the difference between this novel and the genre work that preceded it. The autopsy chapters are rendered with the kind of careful anatomical attention that subsequent forensic thrillers would borrow without crediting; the trace-evidence material (the metallic residue on the victims, the laboratory analysis of the killer's signature) is one of the first proper forensic-thriller demonstrations of how the actual work happens. Scarpetta herself is a more interesting protagonist than the genre had previously managed: divorced, professionally embattled, careful in ways the male detectives around her are not.

Recommended as required forensic-thriller reading, as the right Cornwell entry point, and for fans of Kathy Reichs, Karin Slaughter, and Tess Gerritsen who want the foundational text the subgenre built on. Edgar, Anthony, Macavity, Creasey Memorial Dagger, and French Prix du Roman d'Aventure all in the year of release. Four solid stars and the right place to start the Scarpetta series.