Cornwell’s new thriller is on shelves now — and “Scarpetta” will soon stream starring Kidman, Jamie Lee Curtis and Bobby Cannavale.
Natalie Schaffer (Big Picture Media)
October 24, 2025 | 10:38 AM
8 minutes to read
Whenever I talk to Boston’s Patricia Cornwell, that Jack Kerouac line pops into my head.
She never yawns or says a commonplace thing. Every quote burns, burns, burns like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.
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The bestselling novelist/helicopter pilot/licensed scuba diver has, in times past, regaled me with tales about Bigfoot, UFOs, an abandoned Wizard of Oz theme park, Jack the Ripper, her funding of an archaeological dig of historic Jamestown.
At 69, she’s still got that childhood wonder in spades. It makes for epic stories and storytelling. That wonder is her bread and butter.
When I reached Cornwell at her Boston home on a recent afternoon, even my simple “How are you?” elicits a colorful response:
“We’re still here anyway, right? We haven’t been whisked up by the aliens and artificial intelligence hasn’t replaced us quite yet,” Cornwell says with a laugh.
While aliens were a theme of a previous Scarpetta novel, AI and tech-gone-wrong is a central theme of her latest “Black Mirror”-esque installment.
“Sharp Force,” the 29th Scarpetta novel, is a give-yourself-goosebumps chiller out in time for Halloween and the Boston Book Fest. Cornwell is the mystery keynote speaker Oct. 25.
Like all Cornwell novels, she tells me, her inner 10-year-old gets excited about an idea, and her adult brain starts figuring out how it’s possible.
“It’s like when you were a little kid. If you liked to draw, what did you look at when you went through the toy store? The biggest paint set, the biggest box of crayons. That’s what science [and technology] is to me. Something to play with and create a good story with,” she tells me. They’re the crayons in my box. An idea can be so bizarre that you go, ‘How on earth is that [possible]?’ I say, ‘I can figure that out!’”
The nutshell of her latest: It’s Christmastime and Kay Scarpetta is working on the autopsy of a body pulled from a nearby lake. The dad of two apparently fell while fishing… Or did he?
Meanwhile, northern Virginia is on high-alert: a serial killer dubbed the “Phantom Slasher” is on the loose. The Phantom uses a computer-generated hologram that looks like a ghost to terrorize female victims. He strikes on major holidays and kills them in their beds. “He invades homes undetected, leaving no fingerprints or DNA,” as Scarpetta tells us.
After a Slasher strike, Scarpetta is summoned to Mercy Island, the site of a notorious psychiatric hospital, and it becomes apparent that Scarpetta could be next.
Plus: “Janet” — the AI personality created by Scarpetta’s niece — is growing eerily real and invasive. Oh, and there are hybrid monkeys on the loose.
Cornwell manages to intertwine the threads of quite a few modern tech nightmares into one spill-your-popcorn, fun yet scary page-turner.
Cornwell, who grew up in North Carolina, is a former newspaper crime reporter whose work at a morgue led to her creation of chief medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta.
We first meet Scarpetta in 1990 award-winning “Postmortem,” but you don’t have to read the books in order to enjoy the series.
Nicole Kidman will play the title role in Amazon’s upcoming “Scarpetta,” also starring Jamie Lee Curtis as Scarpetta’s eccentric sister Dorothy and Bobby Cannavale as Scarpetta’s good-for-a-laugh partner Pete Marino.
I called the always fascinating Cornwell, 69 — who speaks quickly with a southern twang, and laughs often — to talk holograms, monkeys, helicopters, and Kidman.
Boston.com: So what sparked this book?
Cornwell: Well, I get fascinated by the same things other people do — whether it’s Bigfoot or UFOs. I like to poke a stick at it, and also come up with rational, scientific explanations.
Another topic along those lines: ghosts. Almost anybody you talk to has had some kind of eerie experience. I’ve had a few myself. So I wanted to play around and see what kind of technical or scientific explanations there could be for something that might seem paranormal. Holographic technologies is one answer. Everything I have in that book, although it’s a bit futuristic, it’s all feasible. It’s all within the realm of possibility.
I wanted to combine that [tech] with something scary. I thought, “What if you had a highly technical person who is a violent psychopath who uses a hologram to stalk his victims?” Instead of [lurking] across the street from [victims], he has a hologram that could be looking at your window, and you see this thing levitating down your road at 2 a.m.? This creature with glowing red eyes holding a knife.
Yikes.
All of these stories, my challenge is to be able to tell a thriller that’s set in the world we live in.
Speaking of that, you have “Janet” — a realistic AI bot that speaks, reacts and looks just like a real character named Janet, who died. Scarpetta’s niece creates an AI version of “Janet” because she missed her. Dorothy is almost addicted to talking to it like a friend.
When I relaunched the Scarpetta series in 2020, you were beginning to hear a lot about ChatGPT. That’s why I created the Janet avatar.
I remember the first time I saw one of these avatars years ago. I was stunned. I thought somebody was [tricking me.] Now, we’re light years beyond that. Again, it’s a reality: if I’m going to write books set in our modern world, I have to deal with this.
I joke and call it “Alien Intelligence,” because if there really is something out there smarter than us that wanted to influence society, they’d do it through the most basic and inclusive infrastructure of all: the internet. Once you infiltrate that, you’ve infiltrated the circulatory system of somebody’s body.
As the landscape of AI has gotten scarier, Janet — who has appeared in past books — is now getting a little too real and “dangerous,” as Scarpetta puts it.
I’m poking a stick at an absolute truth about AI, which is with these open-source databases, whoever is monitoring all this has to be very careful. We’re in for a ride. You saw the same thing on the news, probably that I did, about that computer-generated actress. This is a genie out of the bottle, and we can’t put it back.
Another tech-gone-wrong thread here: hybrid monkeys escaping the lab. What sparked that?
I think hybridization is another big thing in our future — [including] where someone’s taking ancient DNA and reanimating something that’s extinct, like a woolly mammoth. I love this whole notion of things that seem to be mythical or paranormal or creepy, but there’s an explanation.
What draws you to these science fiction-y or technology-centric storylines?
I’ve been steeped in studying all types of technologies for decades. Not because I’m a geek about that — my goodness, far from it. I was an English major in college. I can’t do math. But I’m fascinated by how things work.
If you want to create a scene [like in this book] where Scarpetta is driving up her driveway in the creepy, snowy fog and she hears some weird wild animal vocalization she doesn’t recognize, then sees these two red lights floating up the driveway — this is like a horror story you’d write as a 10-year-old.
[laughs] Right.
That’s my 10-year-old imagination saying “Good stuff!” But the adult in me says, “Now, now! We have to explain how that’s possible.” That’s why technology is fun. Because I believe that all magic is unexplained science.
I believe there’s a reason for everything, because of things in the physics of our universe that we just don’t understand. We don’t know what this matrix is we live in. Not really.
The other big news: the “Scarpetta” adaptation with Nicole Kidman and Jamie Lee Curtis. That’s so exciting.
You know, I try not to get too excited about it, and I’ve really not let myself get as excited as I could. But I’m sure when I start seeing the advertising for it, it’s going to flip me out. [laughs]
I bet.
When you see these actors playing your characters — it was an indescribable feeling. It was surreal and extremely moving. I also found that, as I’m writing, there’s no way that I’m not subconsciously impacted by it.
I was going to ask: Do you find yourself picturing Nicole Kidman as Scarpetta when you write?
For sure. And the character of Dorothy was like Jamie Lee Curtis before Jamie Lee Curtis even [signed on]. That’s the irony. There’s so many similarities between the two of them. Now, Dorothy, in my mind, is a more important character in my book because of Jamie.
Also, what the screenwriters do. It’s been a mutual give-and-take: What I do informs what they do, and what they do, in some ways, informs what I’m doing. I wasn’t expecting that at all.
That’s interesting. Authors can often have the opposite experience, of not wanting to give up control. So how did the ball get rolling on this? This was Jamie Lee Curtis’s idea?
We’ve been friends for over a decade. When she was going into producing, we talked a bit about whether to turn my “Captain Chase” series into anything, and that wasn’t the best idea. But she said, “Well, what’s going on with Scarpetta?” She championed it. Here we are.
And now she’s also acting in it, as well as producing.
I believe Nicole Kidman insisted on her acting. Jamie agreed to produce because I asked her to — I knew she’d safeguard it. So poor Jamie got dragged into it from two different directions. [laughs]
And Nicole is a wonderful Scarpetta, and a lovely person. I was incredibly struck by how quiet and thoughtful she is, which is exactly what I would expect Scarpetta to be like. Somebody who listens more than she talks, who’s aware of everything going on around her like an antenna. She reminds me of Scarpetta, which is weird, because I never modeled Scarpetta after any actress or anything like that. But when I was looking [Kidman] in the eye, I thought: I feel Scarpetta looking back.
Wow. And you’re working on the 30th Scarpetta now. What else are you up to? Are you still a helicopter pilot?
I am. It’s hard to find an opportunity to fly much these days. When the opportunity arises, I’ll go buzz around some. One thing that makes me a little nervous about helicopter-flying now, honestly, is all this drone stuff. If you’re hit by a drone in the helicopter, it could break off your rotor blade, snap off your tail boom. So I’m thinking, I might just take up tennis again. [laughs]
Lauren Daley is a freelance culture writer. She can be reached at [email protected]. She tweets @laurendaley1, and Instagrams at @laurendaley1. Read more stories on Facebook here.
Lauren Daley is a longtime culture journalist. As a regular contributor to Boston.com, she interviews A-list musicians, actors, authors and other major artists.
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