Fictional character biographyDr. Kay Scarpetta was born in Miami, Florida in 1954. She is of Italian descent on both sides of her family, with the Scarpettas emigrating from Verona, Italy. She is blonde, and a sharp dresser, although always professional. As a young girl, she watched her father die slowly from leukemia, and the experience remained with her ever since, translating into her everyday work life, where she is surrounded by death. She is a perfectionist, an incredibly hard worker completely immersed in her work. Scarpetta loves to cook, particularly Italian food. She makes everything from scratch, including pasta and bread, and has a beautiful, custom-built restaurant kitchen in her home.
She was married once, to Tony Benedetti; they divorced about 6 years before the beginning of the first novel set in 1986, Postmortem. Since then she had a serious relationship with Mark James, who died in a bombing in a London Tube station (in the novel Cruel and Unusual) and later Benton Wesley, who was supposedly killed in Point of Origin but later reappeared. In 2007's The Book of the Dead, Scarpetta and Wesley become engaged. By the beginning of 2008's Scarpetta, Benton and Kay are married.
In addition to a large custom-built house that includes a restaurant kitchen, a great room, and a mud room, Scarpetta also drives a new Mercedes, which she replaces often: in one case, after Lucy wrecks it, and in another after it is involved in the murder of her morgue assistant. She can't bear to drive it after his death, so she trades it in for a nearly-identical car.
In the early novels Scarpetta is the Chief Medical Examiner for the Commonwealth of Virginia and works in Richmond. She resigns after the events of The Last Precinct and relocates to Florida to become a private forensic consultant. Scarpetta returns to Virginia in Trace convincing herself that she was fired from her position, at the request of her replacement, Dr. Joel Marcus. In Predator, Scarpetta becomes the head of the National Forensic Academy in Hollywood, Florida, a private institution founded by her wealthy niece Lucy. In The Book of the Dead, Scarpetta has relocated as a freelance forensic examiner/expert to Charleston, South Carolina. In Scarpetta(2008), she has relocated to Massachusetts where she is an M.E but she and Benton also share an apartment in NYC. In The Scarpetta Factor (2009), she is working full-time and Wesley is working part-time in New York.
The name Scarpetta is a diminutive, meaning "Little Shoe", as revealed in the 2009 novel The Scarpetta Factor. This novel points out that the underlying pun is similar to the name of Caligula, whose name means "Little Boots" in Latin. The novel features a Website named Caligula, which is involved indirectly in the murder of a young woman.
