Postmortem

Postmortem is a crime novel by the American writer Patricia Cornwell, published in 1990. It was her first novel and the first of the series about the chief medical examiner Kay Scarpetta, and it won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel in 1991.

Dr Kay Scarpetta holds the office of chief medical examiner for the Commonwealth of Virginia, and the case she is handed is the most recent in a string of unsolved killings in Richmond. The bodies are the work of a strangler, and the scenes carry a detail that the investigators only find after the fact: a substance the killer has used to wipe the area down, which lights up under a laser and shows exactly where he has been. Scarpetta works the pathology with the Richmond detective Pete Marino and an FBI profiler, Benton Wesley, and the early evidence points at the husband of the fourth victim, which is a conclusion she does not believe. Around the investigation she has a ten-year-old niece, Lucy, to look after, and a relationship with the local Commonwealth's attorney that complicates her position in the case.

The novel helped establish the forensic pathologist as a figure in crime fiction, and it begins a series in which the laboratory work and the politics of a state office matter as much as the detective work.