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Patricia Cornwell Talks New Thriller 'The Bone Bed'

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) - Best-selling author Patricia Cornwell has a new thriller out and WCBS 880's Pat Farnack talked to her about it.

"Give me, if you will, a thumbnail sketch of 'The Bone Bed,'" asked Farnack.

"We have our intrepid Dr. [Kay] Scarpetta, who, of course, is the director of the Cambridge Forensics Center in Massachusetts and she's a medical examiner, and she's actually at home cooking her husband's favorite dinner on a lazy Sunday and something lands in her email box that's very perplexing," Cornwell told Farnack. "She opens what looks like a video clip of a boat ride and at first she thinks someone has accidentally mailed her vacation footage. Then, as she's watching this very strange scene of this jet boat, it stops and it dissolves into an image of horror. It's something gory and disgusting and she realizes right away that something very bad is going on. This connects with a dinosaur dig thousands of miles Northwest in Alberta, Canada."

LISTEN: Farnack with Cornwell

"Thus the name 'The Bone Bed' because a bone bed is actually where you find a massive collection of prehistoric bones that get moved by glaciers and rivers and things like that over the millions and millions of years and paleontologists excavate to try to piece these creatures back together again. And one of these paleontologists just vanished from the campsite there several weeks earlier," Cornwell said. "And we're going to find out that what went on in that part of the world connects with something in Scarpetta's own backyard. She literally, within pages of the opening of the book, is going to find herself on a Coast Guard boat heading out into the Boston harbor where a body has [been] diabolically tethered under the water and has gotten entangled with a massive sea creature and she has to go into the water and deal with this scene and recover the body. And also recover evidence from what's called the carapace, which is basically the leathery skin of this leatherback turtle. So she's making friends with a 2,000 pound turtle on the back of a fire boat, so it's really, I think people are going to have fun with this."

The book is published by G.P. Putnam's Sons and just hit shelves today.

Cornwell said she is also working on a movie featuring the main character - Kay Scarpetta - but it's in the very early stages. They don't have a script yet and no casting has been done yet.

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