Patricia Cornwell was born in Miami, Florida, on June 9, 1956, and raised in Montreat, North Carolina. She began working at the Charlotte Observer after graduating from Davidson College in 1979, quickly progressing from listing television shows to writing feature articles to reporting the police beat. Her prize-winning biography of Ruth Bell Graham, A Time for Remembering, was released in 1983 and won an investigative reporting award from the North Carolina Press Association for a series of pieces on prostitution and crime in downtown Charlotte. She worked in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Richmond, Virginia, as a technical writer and computer analyst from 1984 to 1990. Her debut mystery thriller, Postmortem, was published by Scribner's in 1990. It was the first novel to win the Edgar, Creasey, Anthony, and Macavity prizes, as well as the French Prix du Roman d'Aventure, all in the same year, after being rejected by seven major publishing houses.

Cornwell presented Dr. Kay Scarpetta as the valiant Chief Medical Examiner of the Commonwealth of Virginia in Postmortem. After the success of her debut novel, Cornwell has authored a series of blockbusters featuring Kay Scarpetta, her detective sidekick Pete Marino, and her smart and volatile niece, Lucy Farinelli: Body of Evidence (1991), All That Remains (1992), Cruel and Unusual (1993) [which received Brill Prize for Best Detective Created by an American Author] Ruth, A Portrait: The Biography of Ruth Bell Graham was reprinted in 1997 after she updated A Time for Remembering. Cornwell was intrigued by Scotland Yard's John Grieve's statement that no one had ever tried to solve the murders committed by Jack the Ripper using current forensic evidence, so she began her own research into the serial killer's atrocities.

She chronicles her discovery of convincing evidence to prosecute famous artist Walter Sickert as the Ripper in Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper--Case Closed (2002). In January 2006, the New York Times Magazine began a 15-week serialization of At Danger, starring Massachusetts State Police investigator Win Garano and his supervisor, District Attorney Monique Lamont. In the spring of 2008, the sequel, The Front, was serialized in the London Times. Both novellas were then released as books and were quickly optioned for adaptation by Lifetime Television Network, starring Daniel Sunjata and Andie MacDowell. Fox bought the film rights to the Scarpetta novels in April 2009, with Angelina Jolie starring as Dr. Kay Scarpetta. 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 Advisory Board for the Forensic Sciences Training Program at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, NYC, and a member of the Advisory Board for the Forensic Sciences Training Program at the Office of

She's also known for her humanitarian work in animal rescue and criminal justice, as well as endowing college scholarships and advocating for reading on a national level. The creation of an ICU at Cornell's Veterinary Hospital, the archaeological excavation of Jamestown, and the scientific study of the Confederacy's submarine H.L.