Happy Blogiversary to me!

Today is my 16th anniversary as a book blogger. My first post was on January 19, 2010. One of the post types I used to write when I first started blogging was author event recaps. These were easy for me to write as I’d worked as an events manager at Borders for years and was used to monitoring and reporting on an author’s needs, event flow/sales, attendees, etc.

While looking at what I have written about Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta series on this blog, I discovered that one of the first author event recap posts was of her visit to Borders in Oak Brook, IL, on December 2, 2010. I was no longer hosting author events at that time, but was still an employee and got to chat with her before the event, then I was an audience member.

It was perhaps the second time I’d attended a Cornwell event. The first, I think, was for her nonfiction book, Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper—Case Closed, at the Harold Washington Library in Chicago. I won’t digress into that event (which was great), but will get onto the point of this post, my 928th.

Revisiting Scarpetta with a Friend

This is that I’m re-reading the entire Kay Scarpetta series with my friend, John Valeri. Speaking of firsts, John was the first friend I made after we moved to Connecticut. He’s a reader, writer, reviewer, and interviewer extraordinaire, with words in a variety of outlets. We bonded over books, no surprise, and the Scarpetta series was a big part of that initial connection.

John and I have talked about re-reading the series together for years, and figured now was a great time to do it, what with the long-awaited Scarpetta TV series set to air on March 11, 2026, and Cornwell’s memoir, True Crime, publishing on May 5, 2026.

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The Kay Scarpetta Series in publication order

— and the month we plan to read each book:

1. Postmortem, 1990 (Dec 2025)
2. Body of Evidence, 1991 (Jan 2026)
3. All That Remains, 1992 (Feb 2026)
4. Cruel and Unusual, 1993 (March 2026)
5. The Body Farm, 1994 (April 2026)
6. From Potter’s Field, 1995 (May 2026)
7. Cause of Death, 1996 (June 2026)
8. Unnatural Exposure, 1997 (July 2026)
9. Point of Origin, 1998 (Aug 2026)
10. Black Notice, 1999 (Sept 2026)
11. The Last Precinct, 2000 (Oct 2026)
12. Blow Fly, 2003 (Nov 2026)
13. Trace, 2004 (Dec 2026)
14. Predator, 2005 (Jan 2027)
15. Book of the Dead, 2007 (Feb 2027)
16. Scarpetta, 2008 (March 2027)
17. The Scarpetta Factor, 2009 (April 2027)
18. Port Mortuary, 2010 (May 2027)
19. Red Mist, 2011 (June 2027)
20. The Bone Bed, 2012 (July 2027)
21. Dust, 2013 (Aug 2027)
22. Flesh and Blood, 2014 (Sept 2027)
23. Depraved Heart, 2015 (Oct 2027)
24. Chaos, 2016 (Nov 2027)
25. Autopsy, 2021 (Dec 2027)
26. Livid, 2022 (Jan 2027)
27. Unnatural Death, 2023 (Feb 2028)
28. Identity Unknown, 2024 (March 2028)
29. Sharp Force, 2025 (April 2028)

I’ll write a short post about each book as we read through the series, or include them in a wrap-up post, as I did with Postmortem in my 2025 fiction recap post, which we read in December. I’ve already read book two, Body of Evidence, which we’ll discuss this month. I’ll post about that novel soon.

If you’re interested in reading or revisiting Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta Series and want to keep our pace, we are reading them in chronological order, one a month, and plan to have the book read by the last week of the month. John and I don’t have a great track record doing buddy reads together, so please wish us luck!