In 1976, Patsy Daniels, an English major at Davidson College in North Carolina wrote her first book. An autobiographical novel describing a fraught childhood and adolescence, it was never published. In 1990, Patsy, now identifying as Patricia Daniels Cornwell, wrote a forensic thriller, Postmortem, introducing medical examiner Dr Kay Scarpetta to the reading public – and launching a crime fiction series that she claims made her the highest paid female author of the time.

True Crime is the story of how this came about.

Twenty-nine Scarpetta outings later, Cornwell has written a memoir. Selective in its coverage, it’s still a brick of a book. It’s not always a comfortable read. Readers will need to be very interested in the Cornwell back story; the writing is as uneven as I’ve come to expect of her fiction. “I won’t do outlines and I’m not a planner,” she warns.

Review: True Crime by Patricia Cornwell (Sphere)

While the first half of True Crime is a detailed account of her chaotic childhood, apparently drawn from that original autobiographical novel, Cornwell has mined her journals to account for the last 40 years. So, the second half becomes increasingly sketchy. For example:

Early December 1992, I attended the New York premiere of a Few Good Men. Demi [Moore, who was in line to be cast as Scarpetta on film] took me to a party where I met Donald Trump, and we chatted about publishing and writing bestsellers.

Early December 1992, I attended the New York premiere of a Few Good Men. Demi [Moore, who was in line to be cast as Scarpetta on film] took me to a party where I met Donald Trump, and we chatted about publishing and writing bestsellers.

To all appearances, Cornwell is a Republican (there are photographs of her with George and Barbara Bush, taken on holiday). It would be interesting to know a bit more about what she made of Trump. But no chance! On we go to the next celebrity encounter: “I said hello to Christopher Reeve and mentioned that I missed him as Superman.”

To her credit, Cornwell notes that Reeve was not much impressed by her awkward conversational overture.

True Crime opens in 1966, with a snowfall in North Carolina. While ten-year-old Patsy and her........

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