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...

Emily and Jessamine Bach are opposites in every way: Twenty-eight-year-old Emily is the CEO of Veritech, twenty-three-year-old Jess is an environmental activist and graduate student in philosophy. Pragmatic Emily is making a fortune in Silicon Valley, romantic Jess works in an antiquarian bookstore. Emily is rational and driven, while Jess is dreamy and whimsical. Emily's boyfriend, Jonathan, is fantastically successful. Jess's boyfriends, not so...

A woman who has everything going for her gives in to adultery. The heroine is Jo Becker of Massachusetts, a well-off veterinarian with grown children and a husband she loves. One day she meets a man from her past and it happens. The novel analyzes why.

Senator Ashley Butler fervidly opposes any legislation supporting biotechnology and strives to outlaw cloning. His adversary, Dr. Daniel Lowell, has almost perfected an innovative stem cell procedure that reverses the effects of several critical diseases. When Senator Butler learns that he has Parkinson's Disease, he puts his political beliefs aside and makes Lowell a surprising offer: he will become Lowell's guinea pig. But when the powerful new...

"Edward Fosca is a murderer. Of this Mariana is certain. But Fosca is untouchable. A handsome and charismatic Greek tragedy professor at Cambridge University, Fosca is adored by staff and students alike-particularly by the members of a secret society of female students known as The Maidens. Mariana Andros is a brilliant but troubled group therapist who becomes fixated on The Maidens when one member, a friend of Mariana's niece Zoe, is found murdered...

Lee Emery is an empty nester, contentedly married to a man she has known forever and hunkering down in the house where she grew up. She believes she is happy occupying such a familiar emotional and physical space. But questions of the path not taken start to haunt her after she publishes a memoir of her deliciously eccentric grandmother with whom she traipsed through Europe at eighteen. It was then that Lee fell in love for the first time. Twenty-five...

Harvard professor Wilson Chaney's position in life is hanging by a thread; his marriage, his reputation, not to mention his tenure at Harvard are in the hands of a blackmailer, someone threatening to sell Chaney's secrets at very high prices. His enviable life could disappear into thin air should the blackmailer's evidence-proof of his affair with a young student-become public knowledge. So he hires Boston private investigator Carlotta Carlyle to...

Harvard historian Peter Fallon investigates a university legend about an original Shakespeare manuscript that may have survived the Harvard Hall fire of 1764.