Next, Cornwell announced that she had a prize for the fan who traveled the farthest to attend the book signing and that was, of course, the lady from Florida.  I didn’t catch her name, but she’s now the proud owner of this little chocolate treat that was waiting in Cornwell’s room at the Four Seasons when she checked in yesterday.  Cute, isn’t it?

After that Cornwell took questions from the audience.  There were some good questions and she expanded upon each answer to include insights into her take on the series, characters, her process, potential Scarpetta movies, etc.  My favorite of her revelations was the result of someone asking if Scarpetta would ever forgive Marino.  A few books ago in the series (Book of the Dead) Marino attacked Scarpetta in a drunken rage.  Marino has been both an annoying  thorn in Scarpetta’s side and a reliable crime solving partner since book one (Postmortem), and his behavior over the years had grown more obnoxious: he drank more, ate more, and became  more out of control with each subsequent book.  He was always a bit of a caveman.  At the signing tonight Cornwell said that she knew she had to do someting about Marino.  He was becoming a dinosaur, a stereotypical New York cop who says ‘yo’ all the time.  She thought she either needed to kill him off or do something drastic to bring him into the twenty-first century.  Hence, the attack, which ended up being a huge wake up call for Marino that started his transition into a more modern type of criminal investigator as well as a more self-aware human being.  Cornwell’s discussion of why she had him do what he did really shed a lot of light on the series for me and helped me see it in a different way.

I could have listened to Cornwell take questions and talk for hours, but with that big of a crowd they had to contain the Q&A and get to the book signing so that everyone would get their books autographed.  Everyone seemed to have a great time and were patient while waiting to get their books signed.  The line moved quickly.  I couldn’t stick around until the end, but I believe things wrapped up shortly after 9pm.

If you have the opportunity to attend one of Cornwell’s book signings for Port Mortuary, don’t let it pass.  Her schedule is here.  She’s always interesting and entertaining.  And do me a favor and ask her if she has any plans to write another non-fiction book, because I forgot to!