Dr. Kay Scarpetta

The Chief Medical Examiner of Virginia, Kay is the narrator of this detective story. She is an Italian-American Catholic, born in Florida, brought up poor; Kay will "never see thirty-nine again." He hair has become more ash than blond and her eyes hazier. It would take a frontal lobotomy for her to quit smoking. Kay is a perfectionist and a workaholic, who loves to cook Italian food from scratch, and frequently gets over-involved in her cases. That is definitely the case in Body of Evidence.

Watching her father die of leukemia, Kay early on begins to study hard, reads Gray's Anatomy before age 15, leaves home determined not to enter a woman's profession but medicine. After graduating Cornell on scholarship, Kay studies medicine at Johns Hopkins, law at Georgetown, and pathology at Johns Hopkins. She masters the intricacies of death but continues to grieve as a little...