Cornwell, Patricia D.

American crime writer, born in Miami, Florida as Patricia Carroll Daniels. After her parents’ divorce she grew up with her mother in Montreat, North Carolina. Shortly before graduating from Davidson College in 1980, she married her former English professor, Charles Cornwell. By then she had already started working as a journalist at the Charlotte Observer. She soon became the newspaper’s crime reporter. She has also worked as a technical writer and computer analyst at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of Virginia. She separated from her husband in 1989. In 2005, she married Staci Gruber, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.