A woman awakes in the morning to find that someone has picked her apartment's supposedly impregnable door lock and rearranged personal items, even sitting beside her while she slept. The intrusion, the police learn, is a message to the entire city of carnage to come. Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs are brought in to investigate and soon learn that the sociopathic intruder, who calls himself "the Locksmith," can break through any lock or security system...

When Dr. Kay Scarpetta, freelancing from South Florida, returns to Richmond, Virginia, at the request of the recently appointed Chief Medical Examiner, who claims that he needs her help to solve a crime, she finds that nothing is as she left it: her former lab is being demolished; the chief isn't really the one who requested her; her former assistant chief has personal problems that he refuses to reveal; and a glamorous FBI agent meddles with the...

While chief medical examiner Kay Scarpetta investigates the remains of a dismembered woman in a Virginia landfill, she receives an e-mail message from the killer inviting her to download photos of the victim. By the author of Hornet's Nest. Dr. Kay Scarpetta becomes both investigator and victim when she is contacted over the Internet by a murderer who is threatening to loose a deadly virus on the world.

Kay Scarpetta becomes embroiled in a surreal plot that includes a famous actor accused of an unthinkable sex crime and the disappearance of a beautiful millionairess with whom her niece Lucy seems to have shared a secret past. In the seventeenth installment of the Kay Scarpetta series, the police are stumped by a particularly baffling crime. After exhausting all leads, authorities implore the help of Scarpetta, now a CNN senior forensic analyst....

"#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,...

Dr. Kay Scarpetta is working a suspicious death scene in Cambridge, Massachusetts when an emergency alert sounds on her phone. A video link lands in her text messages and seems to be from her computer genius niece Lucy. But how can it be? It's clearly a surveillance film of Lucy taken almost twenty years ago. As Scarpetta watches, she begins to learn frightening secrets about her niece, whom she has loved and raised like a daughter. That film clip...

After he finds himself demoted from forensic pathologist to medical examiner in a Florida resort town, Edward Jenner must investigate the murder of his friend, the appearance of four bodies hanging in the Everglades, and the criminal conspiracy overshadowing it all.

After suffering a terrible personal loss, Dr. Samantha Owens is settling into a new job at Georgetown University when she receives a letter from a dead man asking to solve his murder. As she investigates the man's death, she is pulled into a twenty-year-old mystery involving a kidnapped child as well as the present-day death of Timothy Savage. Forensic pathologist Dr. Samantha Owens autopsies the body of suicide victim Timothy Savage and discovers...