18 December 2023
"There was no call for him to be as unkind as he was," says famed author Patricia Cornwell, who single handedly created the forensic science crime fiction genre.
Robert Merritt, the theater and arts critic for the Richmond Times-Dispatch in 1989, trashed his fellow Richmonder's first crime novel, Postmortem, calling her protagonist, Medical Examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta, a whiner who complained about male chauvinists who obstructed her way to the top of her profession. She was also an unlikeable divorcee with a big ego-something, one must surmise, women weren't allowed to be or have in the 1980s.
