Patricia Cornwell on Listening to Chilling Bigfoot 911 Calls: 'It Makes Your Hair Stand On End' (Exclusive)

The author researched the creature for her new book and latest installment of the Kay Scarpetta series, "Unnatural Death"

Patricia Cornwell’s latest novel features a surprising new character.

“I'm quick to tell everybody that Bigfoot did not kill anybody [in her new book],” Cornwell, 67, tells PEOPLE. “I did not set out to show this creature in that kind of light because that would be unfair.”

Cornwell, the bestselling author of the Kay Scarpetta crime book series, has placed the titular chief medical examiner in another puzzling situation. Her newest entry in the series, Unnatural Death, which publishes Nov. 28 from Grand Central Publishing, finds Scarpetta investigating the grisly murders of two campers in Northern Virginia, as well as a mysterious large footprint.

Scarpetta, who has been identifying killers across 27 books, wades into the supernatural in Unnatural Death. Though Cornwell says the novel is not all about the famous cryptid (“Bigfoot is almost like a cameo”), her research surprised her, despite some initial skepticism.

Related: Man's Bigfoot-Hunting Company Briefly Valued at $10 Billion

"When I started listening to some of the 911 calls of these people that are seeing something out in the back of the woods near their house, or even out their window, you know that whatever it is they’re seeing, they believe they’re seeing something,” says Cornwell, who sold the first novel in the Scarpetta series, 1990’s Postmortem, while working at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Virginia. “It is very, very authentic and makes your hair stand on end, some of the stories.”

To her, fear itself is an interesting notion. A creature like Bigfoot, Cornwell says, “invokes fear because it looks scary to us,” while Jack the Ripper (about whom Cornwell wrote a 2002 nonfiction book) appeared to be a “very handsome, charming man that you would trust with your life.”

“The real monster is the person standing right there who’s handsome,” Cornwell says. “It’s what you are inside.”

Cornwell points out that writing true crime today presents new challenges. She often considers how technology plays a role in her books, and how it affects our lives. Also, many of the places she would go to research her earlier novels are now inaccessible to the public.

“A lot of the things that I explored and brought to light in the 1990s, nobody was writing about those things back then,” she says. “They didn't know the ins and outs of autopsies and forensic labs or the profiling unit at Quantico beyond Silence of the Lambs — places where I would go and spend time and inhabit and [make] friends with people to really learn all this.”

Related: From the PEOPLE Archives: How Jonathan Demme's 'Silence of the Lambs' Was Made -- and the Real Serial Killers That Inspired It

Years of working in the medical examination field, as well as writing about it, does come at a cost. Cornwell admits that there are a number of things she’s come across that were “just too awful” to share in her work.

“I do have my limits,” she says. “If something I experienced was very traumatizing to me, then I'm not going to pass that on to you. I find other ways to show it to you in a way that you understand what you need to, but you don't need to be traumatized.”

Even so, the ever-motivated Scarpetta doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon. Cornwell says that her protagonist continues to surprise her.

“That is part of the fun of it,” she says. “When I really get into a book, even though it's really hard work, I start looking forward to sitting in my chair in the morning because I want to know what's going to happen next. Because I'm thinking, 'Well, what is she going to do when she gets to this?' and 'How is she going to handle that?'"

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Scarpetta, however, may be finding herself in even more curious situations. In addition to a forthcoming TV adaptation of the series, Cornwell teases she's not completely finished with mysterious creatures.

“I'm going to be addressing the whole notion of these UAPs, UFOs and all this talk about there being life beyond this planet, and maybe what that means to us,” she says of her next project. “Keep an open mind because we don't see everything for what it is. We couldn't possibly. I am a big believer in there being a lot more to life than we think there is.”

Unnatural Death is available now.

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