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 as psychiatric prison ward. The handcuffed and chained patient, Oscar Bane, has specifically asked for her, and when she literally has her gloved hands on him, he begins to talk and the story he has to tell turns out to be one of the most...

Dr. Kay Scarpetta, now freelancing with the National Forensic Academy in Florida, takes charge of a case that stretches from steamy Florida to snowbound Boston; one that at first appears as unnerving as any she has ever faced. The teasing psychological clues lead Scarpetta and her team -- Pete Marino, Benton Wesley, and Lucy Farinelli -- to suspect that they are hunting someone with a cunning and malevolent mind whose secrets have kept them in the...

Dr. Kay Scarpetta returns to Richmond, Virginia from freelancing in South Florida at the request of the recently appointed Chief Medical Examiner to solve the murder of a 14-year-old girl, but 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 has personal problems that he refuses to reveal; and a glamorous FBI agent meddles with the case....

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....

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 this a kids' game? If so, why are all of the coins dated 1981 and so shiny they could be newly minted? Her cellphone rings, and Detective Pete Marino tells her there's been a homicide five minutes away. A high school music teacher has been shot with...

"#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,...

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...

Chief medical examiner Kay Scarpetta of Richmond, Virginia, investigates a body found in a ship's container from Europe. A tattoo on the body sends her flying to Interpol headquarters in Lyon, France, where she learns of a killer known as The Werewolf.

A Massachusetts district attorney running for governor decides to use a radical new DNA technology to solve a long-ago murder, but his efforts only result in another outbreak of violence.

When Scarpetta examines a young man's body, she discovers stunning indications that he may have been alive when he was zipped inside a pouch and locked inside the cooler of her new Cambridge Forensic Center in Massachusetts. Various 3-D radiology scans reveal more shocking details about internal injuries unlike any Scarpetta has ever seen. These suggest the possibility of a conspiracy to cause mass casualties, and she races against time to discover...