Patricia Cornwell has led an eventful life, packed with extraordinary experiences more usually seen between the pages of her very own fiction. Abandoned by her father as a child, her mother attempted to 'give' her and her two brothers to the evangelist Billy Graham, whose wife subsequently encouraged the young Patricia to write. At university, she met her future husband, Charles Cornwell, who was seventeen years her senior, and also her English professor. Her other well-documented experiences include anorexia and bulimia, manic depression, a rape by a law enforcement officer when she was a young crime reporter, and, in 1983, a drink-driving car crash, followed by a spell in rehab.

In 1979 she began her career as crime reporter, but soon moved on to become a computer analyst in a medical examiner's office, where the hundreds of autopsies she witnessed inspired the Kay Scarpetta series of novels. Her first bestseller, Postmortem was published in 1990, and following its success, Cornwell quit her job to become a full-time author.

This is a revealing documentary about the life and ever-popular work of an unconventional woman novelist with modern techniques for getting at the truth. From her early career in forensic medicine and her later research, she discusses how her experience has informed her work, as well as elaborating on her controversial theory concerning the true identity of Jack the Ripper - in 2001, she famously spent £2m buying up a large number of the paintings of the English artist Walter Sickert, plus some of his letters and even his writing desk in an attempt to use DNA evidence to prove he was indeed guilty of the Whitechapel murders. Whether her conclusion is definitive is open to debate, but it remains a fascinating journey as Cornwell 'shows her workings'.