Dr. Kay Scarpetta, chief medical examiner for Virginia, investigates the sex murder of a girl by an escaped convict. The probe requires exhuming the body for a second autopsy. Lots of information on bodies and autopsies. By the author of Cruel and Unusual.

Dr. Kay Scarpetta is now freelancing with the National Forensic Academy in Florida. The teasing psychological clues lead Scarpetta and her team to suspect that they are hunting someone with a cunning and malevolent mind whose secrets have kept them in the shadows, until now.

"The new Kay Scarpetta novel . . . . After working one of the worst mass killings in U.S. history, Scarpetta returns home to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Exhausted and ill, she's recovering at home when she receives an unsettling call. The body of a young woman has been discovered on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's rugby field. The victim, a graduate student named Gail Shipman, is oddly draped in ivory linen and posed in a way that is too...

Dr. Kay Scarpetta opens a private forensic pathology practice in Charleston, South Carolina, only to find herself and her colleagues--Pete Marino and her niece, Lucy--confronted by a horrifying series of crimes that may have an underlying link.

Determined to find out what happened to her former deputy chief, Jack Fielding, murdered six months earlier, Kay Scarpetta travels to the Georgia Prison for Women, where an inmate has information not only on Fielding, but also on a string of grisly killings. The murder of an Atlanta family years ago, a young woman on death row, and the inexplicable deaths of homeless people as far away as California seem unrelated. But Scarpetta discovers connections...

#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,...

"A woman has vanished while digging a dinosaur bone bed in the remote wilderness of Canada. Somehow, the only evidence has made its way to the inbox of Chief Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta, over two thousand miles away in Boston. She has no idea why. But as events unfold with alarming speed, Scarpetta begins to suspect that the paleontologist's disppearance is connected to a series of crimes much closer to home: a gruesome murder, inexplicable tortures,...