Patricia Cornwell has said that if she hadn't written her Kay Scarpetta thrillers--the classic first three are collected in this volume--she might find them too scary to read. After all, she is the rare crime writer who knows what she's talking about: she worked on the newspaper crime beat and at the Scotland Yard-like medical examiner's office in Richmond, Virginia, at a time when a serial killer was murdering women just like her. (Cornwell sleeps with a .38 within reach.) Postmortem introduces Dr. Scarpetta, who knows the smell of bone dust from a skullcap saw and how to read a body for clues via lasers, DNA, and computers. As Scarpetta slowly closes in on a killer known as Mr. Nobody, she gets the creepy, well-informed feeling that the killer is closing in on her.
