Patricia Daniels Cornwell

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 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. Then, with shocking speed, events begin to unfold. 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...

Kay Scarpetta offers her services pro bono to the New York City medical examiner's office, in addition to her duties as CNN's senior forensic analyst, which seems to trigger a series of unsettling events, including an apparent death threat. It is the week before Christmas. A tanking economy has prompted Dr. Kay Scarpetta -- despite her busy schedule and her continuing work as the senior forensic analyst for CNN -- to offer her services pro bono to...

Dr. Kay Scarpetta returns to Richmond, Virginia from freelancing in South Florida at the request of the recently appointed Chief Medical Examiner to solve the murder of a 14-year-old girl, but she finds that nothing is as she left it. Her former lab is being demolished; the chief isn't really the one who requested her; her former assistant chief has has personal problems that he refuses to reveal; and a glamorous FBI agent meddles with the case.

The devastating fire tore through the horse farm, destroying everything it touched. Picking through the wreckage, Dr. Kay Scarpetta uncovers human remains -- the work of an audacious and wily killer who uses fire to mask his brutal murders. And when Scarpetta learns that her old nemesis Carrie Grethen has escaped from a hospital for the criminally insane and is somehow involved, the investigation becomes personal. Tragedy strikes close to home. And...

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...

A Massachusetts state investigator is called home from Knoxville, Tennessee, where he is completing a course at the National Forensic Academy. His boss, the district attorney, attractive but hard-charging, is planning to run for governor, and as a showcase she's planning to use a new crime initiative called At Risk-its motto: "Any crime, any time." In particular, she's been looking for a way to employ cutting-edge DNA technology, and she thinks she's...

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...

Dispatched by the district attorney to a declining Massachusetts neighborhood to address a case related to a new public relations campaign, state investigator Win Garano suspects a deeper agenda and becomes involved with a loosely organized association of vigilante police officers, in a case during which he is assisted by his intuitive grandmother.

#1 New York Times bestselling author Patricia Cornwell returns with the remarkable twenty-fourth thriller in her popular high-stakes series starring medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta. 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,...