Forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta testifies in a case, fumbled by the initial pathologist, concerning a drowned beauty queen whose fiancé is charged with her death. Then the judge's sister is murdered. Forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta has just inherited one of the most notorious cases of her career. Two years ago, a former beauty queen's body washed up on the shore of Wallops Island, Virginia. She was last seen on a boat with her fiancé, who...

"#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...

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.

The discovery of the skeleton of a woman murdered two centuries earlier sends a medical examiner on the trail of a long-dead serial killer who terrorized Boston with crimes in which a Harvard Medical School student had become the prime suspect.

"#1 New York Times bestselling author Patricia Cornwell delivers the next enthralling thriller in her high-stakes series starring Kay Scarpetta -- a complex tale involving a serial sniper who strikes chillingly close to the forensic sleuth herself. It's Dr. Kay Scarpetta's birthday, and she's about to head to Miami for a vacation with Benton Wesley, her FBI profiler husband, when she notices seven pennies on a wall behind their Cambridge house. Is...

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...

Nicole Cutty and Megan McDonald are both high school seniors in the small town of Emerson Bay, North Carolina. When they disappear from a beach party one warm summer night, police launch a massive search. No clues are found, and hope is almost lost until Megan miraculously surfaces after escaping from a bunker deep in the woods. Nicole Cutty and Megan McDonald are both high school seniors in the small town of Emerson Bay, North Carolina. When they...