The Body Farm

The Body Farm is a crime novel by the American writer Patricia Cornwell, published in 1994. It is the fifth book in the Dr. Kay Scarpetta series.

Kay Scarpetta is the chief medical examiner, and at the request of the North Carolina authorities she and two colleagues, the FBI profiler Benton Wesley and the detective Pete Marino, travel to the mountains near Asheville to take over the case of eleven-year-old Emily Steiner, who was taken from her bedroom and left by a lake a week later. They find a mother in mourning and an investigation in disarray, because an inexperienced pathologist missed or misread evidence and the reports Scarpetta inherits are inconclusive. Among the questions she has to settle are what caused a strange mark on the child's body, which is serious enough to make her ask a reluctant judge for an exhumation, where trace evidence from a plant that is not native to the Carolinas came from, and where the killer obtained the blaze-orange duct tape used to bind Emily and her mother. The most important question is when Emily died, and it is Scarpetta's attention to time that takes her to the Body Farm, a research facility in Tennessee where decomposition is studied under controlled conditions. She is also dealing with her niece Lucy Farinelli, who is accused of espionage during her internship at the FBI's classified engineering facility in Quantico.

Cornwell's series is built around the work of a medical examiner rather than around a detective, and the forensic detail is the engine of the plots. This is one of the books where the laboratory side of the investigation, and the institutions that support it, take the central place.