Leaving behind her Charleston forensic pathology practice to accept an assignment in New York City, Kay Scarpetta learns the story of an injured psychiatric patient who claims he was attacked by a stalker who was killing someone else at the time.

In Alberta, Canada, an eminent paleontologist disappears from a dinosaur dig site, and at the Cambridge Forensic Center, Kay Scarpetta receives a grisly communication that gives her a dreadful reason to suspect this may become her next case. A body recovered from Boston Harbor reveals bizarre trace evidence hinting of a link to other unsolved cases that seem to have nothing in common. Who is behind all this? And whom can Scarpetta trust? Her lead...

On her quest to find out exactly what happened to her former deputy chief, Jack Fielding, murdered six months before, Scarpetta drives to the Georgia Prison for Women to meet a convicted sex offender and the mother of a vicious and diabolically brilliant killer. Against the advice of her FBI criminal intelligence agent husband, Benton Wesley, Scarpetta is determined to hear this woman out. Scarpetta has both personal and professional reasons to learn...

"The book of the dead is the morgue log. For Kay Scarpetta, it has a new meaning. Moving to Charleston, she opens a forensic pathology practice in which she and her colleagues, including Pete Marion and her niece, Lucy, offer expert crime-scene investigation and autopsies to communities that lack access to modern technology. It seems like an ideal situation, until the battles start with local politicians, with entrenched interests, with someone whose...

Medical examiner Kay Scarpetta becomes involved in a strange murder mystery when she tries to discover who is committing a string of gruesome murders, but she soon realizes that someone would rather have her dead than completing her investigation.

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...

Dr. Kay Scarpetta has left Virginia in quest of peace but instead finds herself drawn into baffling, horrific murders in Florida. There she becomes entangled in an international conspiracy that confronts her with the shock of her life.

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...

Many years ago, Kay Scarpetta accepted a scholarship from the Air Force to pay off her medical school debt. These military ties have taken her to the port mortuary aat Dover Air Force Base for a training fellowship. Upon her return to the Cambridge Forensic Center, Scarpetta is confronted with a case that could shut down her new facility. A young man drops dead, but when his body is examined the next morning, there are indications that he may have...

Kay must find a killer who uses fire to mask his crimes and when she learns that her old nemesis is somehow involved, the investigation becomes personal.