From Potter's Field is a 1995 crime fiction novel by American writer Patricia Cornwell.

The story begins as a rotten Christmas for Scarpetta: Temple Gault has struck again, leaving a naked, apparently homeless woman shot in Central Park on Christmas Eve; Scarpetta, as the FBI's consulting pathologist, is called in.

Later, a transit cop is found shot in a subway tunnel, and, back home in Richmond, Virginia, the body of a crooked local sheriff is delivered to Scarpetta's own morgue by the elusive, brilliant Gault.

In the end, some ingenious forensic detective work and a visit to the killer's agonized family set up a high-tech, difficult to follow, climax back in the New York City Subway, which Gault treats as the Phantom of the Opera did the sewers of Paris.

The term comes from Matthew 27:7 in the New Testament of the Bible, in which Hebrew priests take 30 pieces of silver returned by a guilt-ridden Judas and "used the money to buy the potter's field as a burial place for foreigners."