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Patricia Cornwell began her life of crime as a police-reporter in Charlotte, N.C. Then came several years in the Richmond medical examiner's office, where she assisted as a ''scribe,'' writing down knife-wound measurements and organ weights during autopsies of murder victims. Afterward, she'd head for her favorite Chinese eatery and order-no joke-hacked chicken. ''You can't look at the fruits of so much carnage,'' she admits, ''and remain unchanged.'' But now Cornwell's imagination has taken its revenge, and her writing no longer requires her to don rubber gloves. Two years ago her first novel, Postmortem, introduced readers to the smart, unflinching Kay Scarpetta, Richmond medical examiner, and swept every major crime-novel award. The best- selling Body of Evidence followed, and August will bring the tough, relentless All that Remains, Cornwell's third Scarpetta thriller. ''I think when readers feel the surprise and freneticism in the books, that's because I feel it too,'' she says. ''By the end, I'm writing faster than I can type.'' Cornwell, 36, first approached morgue work as a tool for her research and wrote three unpublished mysteries featuring a male detective before letting Scarpetta, then a minor character, seize the scalpel in Postmortem. Her years as a clinician are one reason the brutality in her novels comes in after-the- fact reconstructions rather than blow-by-blow descriptions. ''One medical detail can make the horror of a crime fill the room,'' she says, beginning a discourse on stomach contents better left unprinted. ''There are some things worse than death-things I'll never show. You don't need to see them, and I don't want to write them.'' But she will write more Scarpetta novels; books four, five, and six are already mapped out. ''I love her quiet intelligence,'' she says of Scarpetta. ''She's so formidable. You wouldn't want to corner her, and God help anyone who sexually harasses her.'' Or Cornwell, for that matter. On a recent publicity tour, she was talking to a group of book shippers when one of them suggested that she take him into a back room and ''convince'' him of her talents. ''If you want me to share my wares,'' she replied, ''I'll be happy to perform an autopsy on any of you.''
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