IN a crowd of strangers, Patricia Cornwell sees the faces of murderers; in a landscape she sees the scars of past tragedies.
'After you have seen things as I have seen things, you cannot forget them; you cannot feel the same about anything again,' says the 37-year-old award-winning crime thriller writer, author of Post Mortem and Cruel and Unusual and observer of over 500 autopsies.
'When I was a crime reporter in North Carolina, I would drive around on police patrol; I would see murder victims and violence.
'And after a while, the landscape became marked with the scenes where tragedy had occurred - the telephone poles where a drunken driver killed a carload of people, the part of a sidewalk where someone was stabbed to death.' For Cornwell, who has gone from police reporter to computer technician at a medical examiner's office in Virginia to super-successful writer with her Kay Scarpetta series, the evil is still around her. She firmly believes in the violent world she recreates in her fiction which deals with the most brutal of serial murders. 'I don't care how handsome someone is, or how nice they appear, anyone can have dark dangerous thoughts. I think that most people would be surprised.' But she has learnt to live with her dark vision. 'It hasn't made me a worse person, I believe. I love beautiful things and I enjoy goodness when I meet it. Things that I feel are tainted or poisonous I try to get away from as soon as possible,' she says.
She grew up in a single-parent family in a poor neighbourhood in the hills of North Carolina and after six books - five of which were crime thrillers featuring Scarpetta, the fictitious chief medical examiner of Virginia, as the indomitable heroine - she is now a wealthy celebrity.
The Bodyfarm, which has just been released, and her next book, From Potter's Field, now almost finished but not due for publication until next August, have together attracted a reported advance of US$4.5 million from her US publishers.
