“Dr Kay Scarpetta, chief medical examiner of the Commonwealth of Virginia, made her fictional debut in Patricia Cornwell’s first crime novel, Postmortem, published in 1990.”

“Cornwell had been both a police reporter and a morgue assistant. And her character was inspired by a real medical examiner she worked with.”

“Postmortem won a slew of crime fiction awards, including an Edgar and the French Prix du Roman d’Aventure.”

“Two years after her debut, in 1992, I saw Cornwell in Melbourne where she was promoting the third Scarpetta book, All That Remains.”

“She had stopped over in Los Angeles on her way to Australia, and told us she was being courted by all the major film studios, who wanted to option the books – and being ardently pursued by actors, including Demi Moore, desperate to play Scarpetta.”

“Now, more than 35 years (and millions of copies sold) since her debut, Scarpetta is finally on screen, as an Amazon Prime streaming series – and apparently Cornwell is very happy about Nicole Kidman’s central casting as the older Scarpetta.”

“The series is set over two time frames – 1998, which follows the plot of the original (1990) novel, and the present, drawing on elements of her 2020 novel Autopsy.”

“According to the new series, Scarpetta got the wrong man in the original: this discovery and attempt to fix it is what drives the plot.”

“Given the difference in height between the five-foot-11 Kidman and the short Scarpetta of the books, I find myself sympathising with those readers who were bemused by the casting of her ex-husband Tom Cruise as Lee Child’s six-foot-five man mountain Jack Reacher in 2012.”

“Cornwell has talked about “terrible fear” dominating her childhood – and influencing her interest in writing psychopaths. Aged five, as a neglected child with a mentally unwell single mother, she was abused by a security guard and had to testify in court.”

“By the turn of the millennium, the brilliant forensic examiner on the trail of the serial killer, not to mention the FBI-trained profiler, were already overworked in fiction and on screen.”

“I once owned a copy of Cornwell’s 1998 cookbook, Scarpetta’s Winter Table, disguised as a novella with Christmas recipes and photographs.”

“We watch Kidman cut into a victim’s rib cage with garden shears. We hear the snap. And was that a liver she just held up?”

“In 1991, Jonathan Demme’s film version of Thomas Harris’ thriller Silence of the Lambs acquainted us with Hannibal Lecter, embodied by Anthony Hopkins – who won an Oscar for his performance.”

“In the wake of the #MeToo era and the very real problem of domestic violence, women now know it is not the creepy stranger they need to fear most, but the man in the bed beside them.”

“Take this set of awkward similes, all in one sentence: The wind moans round the house like a horror movie, remnants of a bad dream deconstructing like clouds as I reach for my phone vibrating on the nightstand.”