Forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta has just inherited one of the most notorious cases of her career. Two years ago, a former beauty queen's body washed up on the shore of Wallops Island, Virginia. She was last seen on a boat with her fianč, who has since been held in jail while awaiting trial. Scarpetta must act as the expert witness for the case, an investigation previously botched by another forensic pathologist. After a grueling cross-examination...

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...

"Centered around Madeline Karno, an ambitious young woman eager to shatter the confines of 1890s France, this novel is a gripping mystery that takes the reader on a captivating journey to find the cause behind a series of suspicious deaths" --

"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. As Scarpetta watches she begins to learn frightening secrets about her niece, whom she has loved and raised like a daughter. That film clip...

Devastated by his friend's death, Parisian forensic pathologist Raphaël Balthazar has vowed never to touch a corpse again. But his resolve wavers when he discovers a dead body while sailing, and soon he's working once more with Chief Inspector Hélène Bach, who's closing in on their most elusive suspect: his wife's killer.

Suave, smart, and somewhat strange, Raphaël Balthazar can make the dead speak like no one else. As a forensic pathologist in Paris, he works with chief inspector Hélène Bach to solve the city's most disturbing crimes. But there's one case that continues to haunt him, the murder of his wife over a decade ago.

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...

When Boston homicide detective Jane Rizzoli and medical examiner Maura Isles are summoned to a crime scene, they find a killing worthy of the most ferocious beast--right down to the claw marks on the corpse. But only the most sinister human hands could have left renowned big-game hunter and taxidermist Leon Gott gruesomely displayed like the once-proud animals whose heads adorn his walls. Did Gott unwittingly awaken a predator more dangerous than...