Join NHPR at the Historic Theater at The Music Hall on Wednesday, Oct. 8, 2025 at 7 p.m. for Writers on a New England Stage featuring Patricia Cornwell and NHPR’s Julia Furukawa for a conversation about Cornwell’s latest thriller, Sharp Force. Tickets are available here.
No one is safe from the serial killer…not even Scarpetta…
During the early hours of Christmas morning, chief medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta receives a chilling call. The Phantom Slasher has struck again.
The serial killer has terrorized Northern Virginia for months. His pattern is to stalk with a sophisticated technology that enables him to invade his victims’ homes and watch their every move. They wake up to a ghost-like hologram before being murdered in their beds.
Scarpetta is summoned to Mercy Island, the site of a notorious psychiatric hospital where two people have been brutalized, one of them from Scarpetta’s past. It soon becomes apparent that she could be next…
SCARPETTA is soon to be a streaming series starring Nicole Kidman and Jamie Lee Curtis!
Patricia Cornwell is a #1 New York Times bestselling author and widely considered one of the world’s top crime writers. Beyond the Scarpetta series, Cornwell has written the definitive nonfiction account of Jack the Ripper’s identity, cookbooks, a children’s book, a biography of Ruth Graham, and three other fictional series based on the characters Win Garano, Andy Brazil, and Captain Calli Chase. Cornwell continues exploring the latest space-age technologies and threats relevant to contemporary life. Her interests range from the morgue to artificial intelligence and include visits to Interpol, the Pentagon, the U.S. Secret Service, and NASA. Cornwell lives and works in Boston.
Writers on a New England Stage is part of our NHPR Books family of literary programs. There you will also find archival audio from NHPR’s Check This Out and Authors on Main—featuring literary greats past and present.
