Chief medical examiner Kay Scarpetta of Richmond, Virginia, investigates a body found in a ship's container from Europe. A tattoo on the body sends her flying to Interpol headquarters in Lyon, France, where she learns of a killer known as The Werewolf.

Medical examiner Kay Scarpetta invites her friends over to celebrate the day after Christmas, and each one brings their own favorite dish, including eggnog, cookies, and pizza stew.

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...

Body of evidence: After months of menacing phone calls and feeling that her every move is being watched, successful writer Beryl Madison flees Key West when a terrifying message is scratched on her car. But the very night she returns to Richmond, she deactivates her burglar alarm and opens her door to someone who nearly decapitates her. Why did she let him in, wonders Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta? And why is Beryl's latest manuscript missing?...

When Scarpetta examines a young man's body, she discovers stunning indications that he may have been alive when he was zipped inside a pouch and locked inside the cooler of her new Cambridge Forensic Center in Massachusetts. Various 3-D radiology scans reveal more shocking details about internal injuries unlike any Scarpetta has ever seen. These suggest the possibility of a conspiracy to cause mass casualties, and she races against time to discover...