{"id":95699,"date":"2025-10-24T15:19:11","date_gmt":"2025-10-24T15:19:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/95699\/"},"modified":"2025-10-24T15:19:11","modified_gmt":"2025-10-24T15:19:11","slug":"patricia-cornwell-talks-new-scarpetta-ahead-of-boston-book-fest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/95699\/","title":{"rendered":"Patricia Cornwell talks new ‘Scarpetta’ ahead of Boston Book Fest"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tBooks\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tCornwell\u2019s new thriller is on shelves now \u2014 and \u201cScarpetta\u201d will soon stream starring Kidman, Jamie Lee Curtis and Bobby Cannavale.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\n\t Natalie Schaffer (Big Picture Media)\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tBy Lauren Daley<\/a>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 24, 2025 | 10:38 AM\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

8 minutes to read<\/p>\n

Whenever I talk to Boston\u2019s Patricia Cornwell, that Jack Kerouac line pops into my head.<\/p>\n

She never yawns or says a commonplace thing. Every quote burns, burns, burns like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\t\"\"\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tEverything to know about the 2025 Boston Book Festival\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n

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<\/a> of historic Jamestown.\u00a0<\/p>\n

At 69, she\u2019s still got that childhood wonder in spades. It makes for epic stories and storytelling. That wonder is her bread and butter.<\/p>\n

When I reached Cornwell at her Boston home on a recent afternoon, even my simple \u201cHow are you?\u201d elicits a colorful response:\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re still here anyway, right? We haven\u2019t been whisked up by the aliens and artificial intelligence hasn\u2019t replaced us quite yet,\u201d Cornwell says with a laugh.\u00a0<\/p>\n

While aliens were a theme of a previous Scarpetta novel, AI and tech-gone-wrong is a central theme of her latest \u201cBlack Mirror\u201d-esque installment.<\/p>\n

\u201cSharp Force<\/a>,\u201d the 29th Scarpetta novel, is a give-yourself-goosebumps chiller out in time for Halloween and the Boston Book Fest<\/a>. Cornwell is the mystery keynote speaker Oct. 25<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

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\u2019s possible.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s 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\u2019s what science [and technology] is to me. Something to play with and create a good story with,\u201d she tells me. They\u2019re the crayons in my box. An idea can be so bizarre that you go, \u2018How on earth is that [possible]?\u2019 I say, \u2018I can figure that out!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The nutshell of her latest: It\u2019s 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\u2026 Or did he?<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, northern Virginia is on high-alert: a serial killer dubbed the \u201cPhantom Slasher\u201d 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. \u201cHe invades homes undetected, leaving no fingerprints or DNA,\u201d as Scarpetta tells us.\u00a0<\/p>\n

After a Slasher strike, Scarpetta\u202fis summoned to\u202fMercy Island, the site of\u202fa notorious\u202fpsychiatric hospital, and it becomes apparent that Scarpetta\u202fcould be next.<\/p>\n

Plus: \u201cJanet\u201d \u2014 the AI personality created by Scarpetta\u2019s niece \u2014 is growing eerily real and invasive. Oh, and there are hybrid monkeys on the loose.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Cornwell manages to intertwine the threads of quite a few modern tech nightmares into one spill-your-popcorn, fun yet scary page-turner.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We first meet Scarpetta in 1990 award-winning \u201cPostmortem<\/a>,\u201d but you don\u2019t have to read the books in order to enjoy the series.<\/p>\n

Nicole Kidman will play the title role in Amazon\u2019s upcoming \u201cScarpetta<\/a>,\u201d also starring Jamie Lee Curtis as Scarpetta\u2019s eccentric sister Dorothy and Bobby Cannavale as Scarpetta\u2019s good-for-a-laugh partner Pete Marino.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I called the always fascinating Cornwell, 69 \u2014 who speaks quickly with a southern twang, and laughs often \u2014 to talk holograms, monkeys, helicopters, and Kidman.<\/p>\n

Boston.com: So what sparked this book?<\/p>\n

Cornwell: Well, I get fascinated by the same things other people do \u2014 whether it\u2019s Bigfoot or UFOs. I like to poke a stick at it, and also come up with rational, scientific explanations.<\/p>\n

Another topic along those lines: ghosts. Almost anybody you talk to has had some kind of eerie experience. I\u2019ve 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\u2019s a bit futuristic, it\u2019s all feasible. It\u2019s all within the realm of possibility.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I wanted to combine that [tech] with something scary. I thought, \u201cWhat if you had a highly technical person who is a violent psychopath who uses a hologram to stalk his victims?\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Yikes.<\/p>\n

All of these stories, my challenge is to be able to tell a thriller that\u2019s set in the world we live in.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Speaking of that, you have \u201cJanet\u201d \u2014 a realistic AI bot that speaks, reacts and looks just like a real character named Janet, who died. Scarpetta\u2019s niece creates an AI version of \u201cJanet\u201d because she missed her. Dorothy is almost addicted to talking to it like a friend.\u00a0<\/p>\n

When I relaunched the Scarpetta series in 2020, you were beginning to hear a lot about ChatGPT. That\u2019s why I created the Janet avatar.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I remember the first time I saw one of these avatars years ago. I was stunned. I thought somebody was [tricking me.] Now, we\u2019re light years beyond that. Again, it\u2019s a reality: if I\u2019m going to write books set in our modern world, I have to deal with this.<\/p>\n

I joke and call it \u201cAlien Intelligence,\u201d because if there really is something out there smarter than us that wanted to influence society, they\u2019d do it through the most basic and inclusive infrastructure of all: the internet. Once you infiltrate that, you\u2019ve infiltrated the circulatory system of somebody\u2019s body.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As the landscape of AI has gotten scarier, Janet \u2014 who has appeared in past books \u2014 is now getting a little too real and \u201cdangerous,\u201d as Scarpetta puts it.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m 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\u2019re in for a ride. You saw the same thing on the news, probably that I did, about that computer-generated actress<\/a>. This is a genie out of the bottle, and we can\u2019t put it back.<\/p>\n

Another tech-gone-wrong thread here: hybrid monkeys escaping the lab. What sparked that?<\/p>\n

I think hybridization is another big thing in our future \u2014 [including] where someone\u2019s taking ancient DNA and reanimating something that\u2019s extinct, like a woolly mammoth<\/a>. I love this whole notion of things that seem to be mythical or paranormal or creepy, but there\u2019s an explanation.<\/p>\n

What draws you to these science fiction-y or technology-centric storylines?<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been steeped in studying all types of technologies for decades. Not because I\u2019m a geek about that \u2014 my goodness, far from it. I was an English major in college. I can\u2019t do math. But I\u2019m fascinated by how things work.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u2019t recognize, then sees these two red lights floating up the driveway \u2014 this is like a horror story you\u2019d write as a 10-year-old.\u00a0<\/p>\n

[laughs] Right.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s my 10-year-old imagination saying \u201cGood stuff!\u201d But the adult in me says, \u201cNow, now! We have to explain how that\u2019s possible.\u201d That\u2019s why technology is fun. Because I believe that all magic is unexplained science.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I believe there\u2019s a reason for everything, because of things in the physics of our universe that we just don\u2019t understand. We don\u2019t know what this matrix is we live in. Not really.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The other big news: the \u201cScarpetta\u201d adaptation with Nicole Kidman and Jamie Lee Curtis. That\u2019s so exciting.<\/p>\n

You know, I try not to get too excited about it, and I\u2019ve really not let myself get as excited as I could. But I\u2019m sure when I start seeing the advertising for it, it\u2019s going to flip me out. [laughs]<\/p>\n

I bet.<\/p>\n

When you see these actors playing your characters \u2014 it was an indescribable feeling. It was surreal and extremely moving. I also found that, as I\u2019m writing, there\u2019s no way that I\u2019m not subconsciously impacted by it.<\/p>\n

I was going to ask: Do you find yourself picturing Nicole Kidman as Scarpetta when you write?<\/p>\n

For sure. And the character of Dorothy was like Jamie Lee Curtis before Jamie Lee Curtis even [signed on]. That\u2019s the irony. There\u2019s so many similarities between the two of them. Now, Dorothy, in my mind, is a more important character in my book because of Jamie.<\/p>\n

Also, what the screenwriters do. It\u2019s been a mutual give-and-take: What I do informs what they do, and what they do, in some ways, informs what I\u2019m doing. I wasn\u2019t expecting that at all.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That\u2019s 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\u2019s idea?<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve been friends for over a decade. When she was going into producing, we talked a bit about whether to turn my \u201cCaptain Chase\u201d series<\/a> into anything, and that wasn\u2019t the best idea. But she said, \u201cWell, what\u2019s going on with Scarpetta?\u201d She championed it. Here we are.<\/p>\n

And now she\u2019s also acting in it, as well as producing.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I believe Nicole Kidman insisted<\/a> on her acting. Jamie agreed to produce because I asked her to \u2014 I knew she\u2019d safeguard it. So poor Jamie got dragged into it from two different directions. [laughs]<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Wow. And you\u2019re working on the 30th Scarpetta now. What else are you up to? Are you still a helicopter pilot?<\/p>\n

I am. It\u2019s hard to find an opportunity to fly much these days. When the opportunity arises, I\u2019ll go buzz around some. One thing that makes me a little nervous about helicopter-flying now, honestly, is all this drone stuff. If you\u2019re hit by a drone in the helicopter, it could break off your rotor blade, snap off your tail boom. So I\u2019m thinking, I might just take up tennis again. [laughs]<\/p>\n

Lauren Daley is a freelance culture writer. She can be reached at [email\u00a0protected]<\/a>. She tweets @laurendaley1<\/a>, and Instagrams at @laurendaley1<\/a>. Read more stories on Facebook here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\t\t\"Profile\t<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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