The author--reputedly one of the highest-paid writers in North America, earning more than $8 million for each "Scarpetta book"--"can write engagingly for pages on techniques for reading blood splatter," remarked
Entertainment Weekly writer Gillian Flynn.
Raised in a Foster Home
Cornwell was born on June 9, 1956, in Miami, Florida, to Sam and Marilyn Zenner Daniels. Her parents divorced when Cornwell was five years old, and her mother moved her daughter and two sons to Montreat, North Carolina. By the time Cornwell was nine years old her mother was suffering from severe clinical depression. Unable to cope, she turned her children over to her Montreat neighbors, the Reverend and Mrs. Billy Graham. Ruth Graham put the children into foster care with a missionary couple who had recently returned from the Congo. It was Ruth Graham who encouraged young Cornwell to pursue writing. "I felt she had real ability," Graham told Joe Treen in People. "I've kept every note I ever got from her." In high school Cornwell earned top grades, but pushed herself in other areas as well, battling anorexia and bulimia.
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