There is no ‘taping’ of the body or clothing with adhesive strip to retrieve contact traces.

She portrays the atmosphere of a murder investigation in a gripping and compelling way.Īs to the forensic science, it is difficult to know how much is due to the author’s knowledge and how much to the differences in practices between American and British detectives.įor example, in Cornwell’s murder scenes, there are no scientific officers wearing protective overalls to stop fibres from their clothes mixing with the evidence. James also worked on the peri phery of forensic science and, as does Cornwell, gets it almost all right.Ĭornwell begins with a night call, with her heroine driving through the streets of a city at the behest of the criminal investigation department, wondering what will be at the end of the ride. James, who writes ‘inside job’ books as Cornwell does, books that benefit from occupational exposure to the subject matter – in this case, the scientific investigation of crime. Herbert Lieberman’s book City of the Dead, for example, is loosely based on the New York CME, Milton Helpern. There is now a substantial stable of ‘authentic’ forensic pathologist yarns, from television’s painful Quincy to the infinitely preferable The Expert (remember Marius Goring on BBC?).

During her stay, there were serial murders of five professional women, which spurred Cornwell to write a novel, written from the strongly feminist viewpoint of a mythical – but very believable – Chief Medical Examiner Dr Kay Scarpetta.

The CME is the American equivalent of a coroner and forensic pathologist rolled into one. PATRICIA CORNWELL is a former crime reporter who went to work as a computer analyst in the Chief Medical Examiner’s Office in Richmond, Virginia. Postmortem by Patricia Daniels Cornwell, Macdonald, pp 293, Pounds sterling 12.95

Postmortem by Patricia Cornwell