Virginia's Chief Medical Examiner and sleuth Dr. Kay Scarpetta must employ all the investigative technology at her disposal in a hunt for the brutal murderer of a writer who had been involved in a bizarre relationship.

"...New York City medical examiner Laurie Montgomery returns to work at the Office of Chief Medical Examiner, where she's been employed for more than two decades. Worried about whether she still has what it takes after so much time away, Laurie finds her first case back to be a dangerous puzzler of the highest order, involving organized crime and two start-up biotech companies caught in a zero sum game...." --inside front cover.

Present day: Julia Hamill has made a horrifying discovery on the grounds of her new home in rural Massachusetts: a skull buried in the rocky soil -- human, female, and, according to the trained eye of Boston medical examiner Maura Isles, scarred with the unmistakable marks of murder. But whoever this nameless woman was, and whatever befell her, is knowledge lost to another time. Boston, 1830: In order to pay for his education, Norris Marshall, a talented...

Kay Scarpetta accepts an assignment in New York City, where she learns the story of Oscar Bane, an injured psychiatric patient who claims he was attacked by a stalker who was killing someone else at the time. Leaving behind her private forensic pathology practice in Charleston, South Carolina, Kay Scarpetta accepts an assignment in New York City, where the NYPD has asked her to examine an injured man on Bellevue Hospital?s psychiatric prison ward....

A body is discovered in a Virginia landfill. The details -- expert removal of head and limbs -- mirror that of a case Dr. Kay Scarpetta has been investigating in Ireland. But for Scarpeita, the game has only just begun. The killer boldly contacts her via the Internet, signing off with the ominous screen name deadoc. As her investigation deepens, Scarpetta discovers that the victim in Virginia was exposed to a rare smallpox-like virus before she was...

#1 New York Times bestselling author Patricia Cornwell returns with the remarkable twenty-fourth thriller in her popular high-stakes series starring medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta. In the quiet of twilight, on an early autumn day, twenty-six-year-old Elisa Vandersteel is killed while riding her bicycle along the Charles River. It appears she was struck by lightning--except the weather is perfectly clear with not a cloud in sight. Dr. Kay Scarpetta,...

On her quest to find out exactly what happened to her former deputy chief, Jack Fielding, murdered six months before, Scarpetta drives to the Georgia Prison for Women to meet a convicted sex offender and the mother of a vicious and diabolically brilliant killer. Against the advice of her FBI criminal intelligence agent husband, Benton Wesley, Scarpetta is determined to hear this woman out. Scarpetta has both personal and professional reasons to...

After working one of the worst mass killings in U.S. history, Scarpetta returns home to Cambridge, Massachusetts, when she receives an unsettling call. The body of a young woman has been discovered on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's rugby field, and physical evidence links the case to a series of uniquely weird homicides in Washington, D.C., where Scarpetta's FBI husband has been deployed to help capture a serial killer dubbed the Capital...

In 1959, Dr. Lucian Blake returns to his Australian hometown to continue his late father's medical practice, but it is his additional responsibility as the town's chief medical officer that leads him to investigating cases of suspicious death.

On a serene summer Sunday, a routine admission for a run-of-the-mill surgery at Atlanta's Emory Hospital goes tragically wrong, setting off a catastrophic wave of destruction that sends the facility and the surrounding area into lockdown. One of the city's largest and most prestigious institutions, Emory is situated near the Centers for Disease Control, the FBI counter-terrorism headquarters, and a large children's hospital. Anything that happens...