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, the Cambridge Forensic Center's director and chief, decides at the scene that this is no accidental Act of God. Her investigation becomes complicated when she begins receiving a flurry...

Massachusetts Chief Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta has just returned from working a mass murder when she's awakened by Detective Pete Marino. A body, draped in an unusual cloth, has been discovered at MIT, and it's suspected it is computer engineer Gail Shipman. It appears she's been murdered, mere weeks before the trial in her $100 million lawsuit against her former financial managers. She also fears the case may have a connection with her computer...

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? Its 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 and...

Kay Scarpetta, despite her busy schedule, has offered her services to New York City's Medical Examiner. Her increased visibility seems to precipitate unsettling events. She is asked live on CNN about the case of Hannah Starr, who has vansihed and is presumed dead. During the same telecast she receives a call-in from a former psychiatrist patient of Benton Wesley's. When she returns home after the show, she finds a package, possibly a bomb, waiting...

Virginia's Chief Medical Examiner, Kay Scarpetta, is an object of suspicion and criminal investigation. The so-called Werewolf murders may have extended to New York City and into the darkest corners of Scarpetta's past. When a formidable prosecutor, a female assistant district attorney, is brought into the case, Scarpetta must struggle to make what she knows to be the truth prevail against mounting evidence to the contrary.

Kay Scarpetta and her husband Benton Wesley, now a forensic psychologist with the U.S. Secret Service, have relocated to Old Town Alexandria, where she’s headquartered five miles from the Pentagon in a post-pandemic world that’s been torn by civil and political unrest. After just weeks on the job, she’s called to a scene by railroad tracks--a woman’s body has been shockingly displayed, her throat cut down to the spine--and as Scarpetta begins...

Two mauled bodies in the woods. Top secret autopsies. The most chilling cases of Scarpetta's career. In this thrilling new installment of Patricia Cornwell's #1 bestselling Scarpetta series, chief medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta finds herself in a Northern Virginia wilderness examining the remains of two campers wanted by federal law enforcement. The victims have been savaged beyond recognition, and other evidence is terrifying and baffling, including...

Scarpetta travels to Richmond, Virginia, at the odd behest of the recently appointed Chief Medical Examiner, who claims that he needs her help to solve a perplexing crime. When she arrives, however, Scarpetta finds that nothing is as she expected: her former lab is in the final stages of demolition; the inept chief isn't the one who requested her after all; her old assistant chief has developed personal problems that he won't reveal; and a glamorous...

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. That film clip and then others sent soon after raise dangerous legal implications that increasingly isolate Scarpetta and leave her confused,...

New Year's Eve and the final murder scene of Virginia's bloodiest year since the Civil War takes Scarpetta 30 feet below the Elizabeth River's icy surface. Ted Eddings, an investiagtive reporter who was a favorite at the Medical Examiner's office, has died while scuba diving. Was Eddings probing the frigid depths of the river for sunken trinkets -- or was he after a story?