Cruel and Unusual

Cruel and Unusual is a crime novel by the American writer Patricia Cornwell, published in 1993. It is one of the books about Kay Scarpetta, the chief medical examiner of Virginia, and it is as much about how the office works as about the crime. It is told through her working life: the morgue, the laboratory and the paperwork that surrounds a death.

Scarpetta is waiting in the morgue for the body of Ronnie Joe Waddell, a convicted murderer who is due to be executed. Preparing for an autopsy before the subject is dead is a strange feeling, and one she has had before, and she is conscious of the arrangement as it is made ready: the warrant, the witnesses, the instruments and a man who is still breathing.

Waddell's death is not the last she hears of him. The novel follows what happens afterwards, as the office, the case and Scarpetta's own position inside it come under pressure, and it keeps the procedures of forensic pathology in the foreground while the investigation widens.