Postmortem
Patricia Daniels Cornwell
Mass Market Paperback
(Harpercollins, March 15, 1993)
Postmortem is a crime fiction novel by author Patricia Cornwell. The first book of the Dr. Kay Scarpetta series, it received the 1991 Edgar Award for Best First Novel. The novel opens as Dr. Kay Scarpetta, Chief Medical Examiner for the state of Virginia, receives an early-morning call from Sergeant Pete Marino, a homicide detective at the Richmond Police Department with whom Scarpetta has a tense working relationship. She meets him at the scene of a woman's gruesome strangling, the latest in a string of unsolved murders in Richmond