Unnatural Exposure (novel)

Unnatural Exposure is a crime fiction novel by Patricia Cornwell. It is the eighth book in the Dr. Kay Scarpetta series. The story is set in Richmond, Virginia and Ireland.
Plot summary.
Virginia Chief Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta has a bloody puzzle on her hands: five headless, limbless cadavers in Ireland, plus four similar victims in a landfill back home. Is a serial butcher loose in Virginia? That's what the panicked public thinks, thanks to a local TV reporter who got the leaked news from Scarpetta's rival, Investigator Percy Ring. But this is no run-of-the-mill serial killer. A shadowy figure has plans involving mutant smallpox, mass murder, and messing with Scarpetta's mind by e-mailing her hot naked photos of the murder scenes, along with cryptic AOL chat-room messages. Central to the plot is the case of Janet Parker, the last person known to have died of smallpox, which she contracted in 1978 due to a lab accident in Birmingham, England, after the disease was eradicated in the wild. Cornwell makes the villain a junior employee of the lab at the time who was made a scapegoat for the accident and whose career was blighted as a result. This provides the plot with a credible source for the virus and a motive for the central crime.
The emergency response is complicated by a Federal budget freeze, when all "non-essential" government employees are sent home. Cornwall says in an introduction to a 2008 reprint that a decade ago the idea of a deliberate virus threat seemed fanciful and improbable, and she got more access to government facilities like the CDC for researching the book than she would have got a decade later. She said that her "modus operandi when I write a book is to ask my characters where they are and what they are doing. Then I focus on an image. From that image comes the story ... ".