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...

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.

"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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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 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.

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...