Book of the Day

From the review

Patricia Cornwell's argument, stated plainly, is that Scarpetta didn't come from a morgue internship or a police beat. She came from a childhood that trained Cornwell to watch for danger before it arrived. That's a bold claim for a memoir to stake out, and the early chapters back it up with real weight: a father who walks out on Christmas Day, a mother committed twice to psychiatric care, a foster placement that runs from indifferent to cruel. Cornwell writes those years without softening them, and without fishing for sympathy either. She just lays out what happened and lets the reader do the arithmetic on how a kid that unmoored ends up fascinated by the mechanics of death. The hinge of the book is Ruth Graham, Billy Graham's wife, who takes an interest in young Patricia that reads less like charity and more like recognition. It's the strongest material here because it's the least expected: a chapter of American religious history colliding with a future crime novelist's adolescence, rendered with genuine tenderness instead of the reverence you'd assume a Graham connection might invite. A near-fatal car accident and a long hospitalization later on carry similar force, less for the incident itself than for what Cornwell does with the recovery, treating it as the moment she stopped being a passive subject of her own life.