Patricia Cornwell on Listening to Chilling Bigfoot 911 Calls: ‘It Makes Your Hair Stand On End’ (Exclusive)

Patricia Cornwell’s latest novel features a surprising new character. “I’ll be quick to tell everyone that Bigfoot didn’t kill anyone [in her new book],” Cornwell tells PEOPLE. “I didn’t mean to portray this creature in that light because it wouldn’t be fair.” Cornwell, author of the best-selling Kay Scarpetta series of crime books, has placed the titular chief medical examiner in another puzzling situation. Her latest entry in the series, Unnatural deathout Nov. 28 from Grand Central Publishing, finds Scarpetta investigating the grisly murders of two campers in Northern Virginia, as well as a mysterious large footprint.

Patricia Cornwell’s ‘Unnatural Death’.

Grand Central Publishing

Scarpetta, who has identified killers in 27 books, enters the supernatural in Unnatural death. Although Cornwell says the novel isn’t just about the famous cryptid (“Bigfoot is almost like a cameo”), her research surprised her, despite some initial skepticism.

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“When I started listening to some of the emergency calls from people who see something in the back of the woods near their house, or even out their window, you know that whatever they see, they believe I’m seeing something,” says Cornwell, who has sold his first novel from the Scarpetta series, 1990s. Postmortem, while working in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Virginia. “It’s very, very authentic and hair-raising, some of the stories.” For her, fear itself is an interesting concept. A creature like Bigfoot, Cornwell says, “causes fear because it looks scary to us,” while Jack the Ripper (about whom Cornwell wrote a 2002 nonfiction book) seemed like “a very handsome, charming man you’d trust with your life.”

Alleged Bigfoot photo.

Bettmann/Getty

“The real monster is the handsome person standing there,” says Cornwell. “It’s who you are on the inside.” Cornwell points out that true crime writing today presents new challenges. In his books, he often thinks about what role technology plays and how it affects our lives. Also, many of the places she would go to research her earlier novels are now off limits to the public. “A lot of things that I researched and brought to light in the 1990s, nobody wrote about those things then,” she says. “They didn’t know the ins and outs of autopsies and forensic labs or the profiling unit at Quantico beyond that. Silence of the Lambs — places where I would go and spend time and live and [make] friends with people to really learn all this.”

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Patricia Cornwell 2013

Heidi Gutman/Disney General Entertainment via Getty

Years of working on a medical exam, as well as writing about it, have their price. Cornwell admits there are a number of things she encountered that were “too awful” to share in her work. “I have my limits,” she says. “If something I experienced was very traumatizing to me, then I will not pass it on to you. I find other ways to show it to you in a way that you understand what you need, but you don’t need to be traumatized.” Even so, the ever-motivated Scarpetta doesn’t seem to be letting up anytime soon. Cornwell says her protagonist continues to surprise her. “That’s part of the fun.” , she says. “When I really get into the book, even though it’s really hard work, I start looking forward to sitting in my chair in the morning because I want to know what’s going to happen next. Because I think, ‘Well, what’s she going to do when she comes to this?’ and ‘How is she going to take it?'”

Patricia Cornwell.

Patrick Ecclesine

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However, Scarpetta may find herself in even stranger situations. With the upcoming TV adaptation of the series, Cornwell teases that she’s not completely done with the mysterious creatures. “I’m going to deal with the whole idea of ​​these UAPs, UFOs and all this talk of there being life beyond this planet, and maybe what that means for us,” she says of her next project. “Be open-minded because we don’t see everything as it is. We couldn’t possibly. I firmly believe that there is much more to life than we think there is.”Unnatural death is now available.

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Source: HIS Education