Patricia Cornwell

A USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Amazon Charts bestseller.

International bestselling author Patricia Cornwell delivers pulse-pounding thrills in the first book in a series featuring a brilliant and unusual new heroine, cutting-edge cybertechnology, and stakes that are astronomically high.

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Forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta has come almost full circle, returning to Virginia as the chief medical examiner, the state where she launched her storied career. Finding herself the new girl in town once again after being away for many years, she's inherited not only an overbearing secretary, but also a legacy of neglect and potential corruption. She and her husband Benton Wesley, now a forensic psychologist with the U.S. Secret Service, have...

"#1 New York Times bestselling author Patricia Cornwell delivers the next enthralling thriller in her high-stakes series starring Kay Scarpetta--a complex tale involving a serial sniper who strikes chillingly close to the forensic sleuth herself.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...

After working one of the worst mass killings in U.S. history, Scarpetta returns home to Cambridge, Massachusetts, when she receives an unsettling call. The body of a young woman has been discovered on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's rugby field and physical evidence links the case to a series of uniquely weird homicides in Washington, D.C., where Scarpetta's FBI husband has been deployed to help capture a serial killer dubbed the Capital...

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...

"In the aftermath of a sabotaged NASA rocket launch gone, Captain Calli Chase comes face-to-face with her missing twin sister, as well as the startling truth of who they really are. Now a top secret program put in motion years ago has spun out of control, and Calli embarks on a frantic search for the missing link between the sabotaged rocket launch and her predetermined destiny. But it's a search that someone else is very interested in stopping."--Publisher....

In New York, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, chief medical examiner, matches wits with a sadistic killer who operates in the subway tunnels. After killing a transit policeman he infiltrates the FBI's computers and sends her taunting messages while continuing to kill. The Central Park (New York) murder of a young, homeless woman on Christmas sends medical examiner Scarpetta, her friend Captain Marino, & her niece on a chase that ends in the subway. The sixth suspense...

The "book of the dead" is the morgue log, the ledger in which all cases are entered by hand. For Kay Scarpetta, however, it is about to have a new meaning. Fresh from her bruising battle with a psychopath in Florida, Scarpetta decides it's time for a change of pace-not only personally and professionally, but geographically. Moving to the historic city of Charleston, South Carolina, she opens a unique private forensic pathology practice, one in which...

A Massachusetts district attorney running for governor wants to use some radical new DNA technology to solve a long-ago murder. The result? A new round of violence.

Kay Scarpetta--now a senior forensic analyst for CNN--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.