Patricia Cornwell. Hachette. $34.99.
Patricia Cornwell once tattooed a supermarket-bought turkey to test how the mark on its skin would fade. Best known for her thrillers about crime pathologist Dr Kay Scarpetta, Cornwell gets forensic on her own life in this memoir tracing her childhood traumas, her start as a police reporter and her success as an author. She reveals she was drugged and raped by a cop while covering crime in North Carolina for the Charlotte Observer - an experience reflected in her first Scarpetta book, 1990's Postmortem. To recapture her earliest memories, including abuse as a five-year-old, she exhumed a 300-page university thesis about her eating disorder written when she was 19, under her birth name Patsy Daniels.
