True Crime surprised me. I assumed I would be more interested in Cornwell’s adult years, the time when her Scarpetta novels took off. But looking back on the reading experience, I preferred the earlier part of the memoir — Cornwell’s writing about her childhood is engaging and impressive for its storytelling, pacing, and restraint.

True Crime by Patricia Cornwell, her much-anticipated memoir, is out now. True Crime is a perfect title for the memoir of the woman whose novels launched the forensic investigation craze. Her preface is titled, “What Drove Me To It.”

What drove her to write it

What drove Cornwell to write this memoir was talk of a TV series based on her life. Cornwell finished her last novel five months early. This gave her time to “draft an autobiographical treatment” for the show, which morphed into this memoir.

Cornwell takes her time writing about her childhood and early adulthood, which takes up over half the book (actually, about 75%). This was an enjoyable reading experience, even if the content was often hard. Cornwell had a rough childhood filled with neglect, abuse, and unreliable adults. She takes her time showing how people, events, and circumstances shaped her and how she felt about it–from her earliest years in Florida when a pedophile targeted her, to a neighbor boy asking her to put screws up his bum, to the daily anxiety of living with parents who were emotionally unavailable and unstable. After her father left for another woman, her mother moved the children to Montreat, North Carolina, to live near evangelist Billy Graham.

Her mother’s mental health continued to decline in North Carolina and took a steep dive when her ex-husband remarried and started a new family. While she underwent inpatient psychiatric treatment, Cornwell and her two brothers entered foster care. Ruth Graham helped the family during this time and would become a crucial, positive influence in Cornwell’s life. The foster home turned out to be another unhealthy and abusive situation for a variety of reasons, including the foster mother’s enforcement of rigid, punishing gender roles, which contributed to, if not caused, Cornwell’s eating disorders. Young Cornwell also witnessed neglectful and abusive treatment of pets. It’s one of the reasons that she and her spouse, Staci Gruber, donate millions to animal welfare.

Passions and Purpose

Cornwell’s first passion was tennis. She hoped to play professionally, but that was not meant to be. After graduating from college, she became a reporter for The Charlotte Observer and married an English professor, Charles Cornwell, whom she had pursued for years. She found a new passion, writing about crime, and loved the job, but it was ruined after multiple assaults by a powerful man associated with her work. Cornwell’s husband decided to become a minister, and they moved to Richmond, Virginia, so he could attend seminary. There she met Dr. Marcella Farinelli Fierro, the first female chief medical examiner of Virginia and Cornwell’s model for Scarpetta. Fierro was technically the deputy chief, or second-in-command, when they first met in 1984.

After Cornwell’s dogged determination to research and write Ruth Graham’s biography, against the wishes of practically everyone, she tried her hand at mysteries. Her first three novels were rejected. Cornwell asked Sara Ann Freed, an editor at The Mysterious Press, if she should quit writing. Freed told her to write about her day job, which by then was working at the morgue with Fierro. The rest, as they say, is history.

The first novel featuring protagonist Kay Scarpetta, Postmortem, didn’t make an immediate splash, but it quickly picked up speed. One book led to another, and the Scarpetta series made her the highest-paid woman writer until J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series came along. As a child, Cornwell had a vision of a bookshop window filled with her books and later a dream that she would take Agatha Christie’s place. As logical and science-based as her brain is, Cornwell is also a bit of a mystic.

Life into fiction

Fans will see what drove Cornwell to create Scarpetta and how her life informs her writing. I happened to read The Body Farm, Scarpetta #5, right after finishing True Crime. The Body Farm is set partially in North Carolina, where Cornwell grew up. There were many bits from the memoir in this novel: from Benton Wesley eating his soup in the way her foster mother made her eat hers to helicopters landing in the neighborhood.

In The Body Farm, Scarpetta’s niece, Lucy, is a college student interning with the FBI. She has a drinking problem, crashed her aunt’s car, and something also happened at Quantico. Lucy is admitted into a Rhode Island treatment facility, the same treatment center Cornwell admitted herself into after a car accident while driving under the influence. In real life, had Cornwell been driving her convertible instead of a rental, she would have died as the car flipped several times. Rhode Island would be Corwell’s second time at a treatment facility. Years earlier, she sought treatment for eating disorders at the same institution where her mother had been treated in Asheville, NC.

Two parts

For most of the book, I thought a reader unfamiliar with Cornwell’s work but familiar with memoirs might enjoy True Crime. It is a well-written snapshot of growing up and coming of age under hard circumstances in the 1960s-1970s.

Unfortunately, the second part loses the reflective qualities and pacing of the first. There is a noticeable shift in the memoir in the writing style and tone. What had been good storytelling turns into a who’s who of the 1990s. There is a lot of name-dropping. It feels choppy and detached.

There are 48 chapters in True Crime. Chapters 1-36 cover her family background through November 1992. Chapter 37 opens in December 1992 on page 351 of 451 pages. Many years are squeezed into those one hundred pages. (I read an advance reader copy, so the pages may be different in the finished book.)

Cornwell addresses many of the tabloid-worthy events in her life, such as the previously mentioned car accident, her financial manager’s embezzlement, and affairs. There is one cringeworthy moment when Cornwell laments that it is “illogical and unfair” that Barnes and Noble, Waterstones, and other brick-and-mortar bookstores do not stock the two space thrillers she wrote for Amazon. She thought they’d “come around.” It is a surprisingly tone-deaf statement from an author who has sold over 100 million books. Can she be unaware of the harm Amazon has caused booksellers?

Naming names

During her early years of skyrocketing fame, Cornwell partied with Demi Moore, an early contender to play Scarpetta, and met celebrities, politicians, and other important people. As a young adult in North Carolina, she had been a tennis instructor for one of Barbara Bush’s kids. As a famous writer, she became friends with the Bush family.

She pals around with Orrin Hatch to the point that it pisses off the senator’s wife. Cornwell and Hatch met in the Beverly Hills Hotel gym while working out and hit it off. A year later, Cornwell reached out to him regarding the FBI’s funding needs for its training facility at Quantico. Hatch didn’t believe that Clarence Thomas sexually harassed Anita Hill. After Cornwell asks him about it, he takes her to Thomas’s office, where the Supreme Court Justice spends two hours explaining “his version of the story.” Cornwell is mum about what he said and what she thinks about Thomas. She details Larry King’s sexual harassment and persistent advances toward her and how she struggled to handle these situations. Many more people are named, including Clinton, Oprah, and Jodie Foster, to name a few.

Writing is in her DNA

A very exciting thing for this 19th-century lover is that Cornwell might be related to Harriet Beecher Stowe! One of my favorite stories is when Joan Hedrick gives Cornwell a tour of the Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Hartford, CT, and they visit Stowe’s archives afterward. I’m a fan of both Stowe and Hedrick’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life. A trifecta of outstanding writers.

True Crime is a good read. What I mention in this review only scratches the surface. Cornwell is no doubt gaining more fans due to the new Scarpetta series on Prime, and this memoir is coming out at just the right time.

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TRUE CRIME by Patricia Cornwell
Published by Grand Central on May 5, 2026
The bottom line: Fans of Cornwell won’t want to miss this, and those who are curious about a famous writer’s life — from childhood formation to literary success — might enjoy it as well.