Unnatural Exposure

Unnatural Exposure is a crime novel by American writer Patricia Cornwell, published in 1997. It is the eighth book in the series centred on Dr. Kay Scarpetta, Virginia's chief medical examiner, and is set in Richmond, Virginia, and Ireland.

The story opens with a grim puzzle: five headless, limbless bodies turn up in Ireland, and four similar victims are found in a landfill back home. Panic spreads when a local television reporter broadcasts leaked news from Percy Ring, Scarpetta's rival, and the public begins to fear a serial butcher on the loose. The real culprit, however, is no ordinary killer. A shadowy figure plans to unleash a mutant strain of smallpox, to cause mass death, and to unsettle Scarpetta herself by sending her explicit photographs of the crime scenes and cryptic messages in online chat rooms.

At the heart of the plot is the case of Janet Parker, the last person known to have died of smallpox, who was infected in 1978 through a laboratory accident in Birmingham, England, long after the disease had been eradicated in the wild. Cornwell makes the villain a former junior lab employee who was made a scapegoat for that accident and whose career was ruined. This gives the novel a plausible source for the virus and a motive for the crimes. The emergency response is further hampered by a federal budget freeze that sends home all "non-essential" government workers.

In an introduction to a 2008 reprint, the author recalls that a decade earlier the idea of a deliberate viral threat seemed far-fetched, and that she gained access to government facilities such as the CDC that she would likely not have obtained later. The book was a commercial success and helped consolidate the popularity of the series.