"#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,...

Gwen Marcey has done a good job keeping the pain of her past boxed up. But as she investigates the case of a missing child in Lapwai, Idaho, details keep surfacing that are eerily similar to her childhood traumas. She doesn't believe in coincidences. So what's going on here? No one knows more about the impact of the past than the Nez Perce people of Lapwai. Gwen finds herself an unwelcome visitor to some, making her investigation even more difficult....

As a medical examiner, Samantha Owen's job is to make a certain sense of death with crisp methodology. But the day the Tennessee floods took her husband and children, the light vanished from her life. She's pulled into a suffocating grief until she receives a peculiar call from Washington D.C. On the end of the line is an old boyfriend's mother, asking Sam to do a second autopsy on her son. Eddie Donovan is officially the victim of a vicious carjacking,...

Forensic pathologist Edward Jenner survived the horrific ordeal of the Inquisitor serial slayings in New York, but not the political fallout. With his state medical license suspended, he hopes to repair his shattered life while working as a medical examiner in Douglas County, Florida. But evil is not confined to big cities alone. Two corpses pulled from a sunken car-followed by the grisly discovery of four more bodies hanging in the Everglades-are...

Scarpetta finds herself in the unsettling pursuit of a serial sniper who leaves no incriminating evidence except fragments of copper. Then she comes face to face with shocking evidence that implicates her techno-genius niece, Lucy, Scarpetta's own flesh and blood.

Julia Hamill is pulled into a nineteenth-century mystery when she discovers a human skull bearing the signs of a violent death in her backyard.

After suffering a terrible personal loss, Dr. Samantha Owens is settling into a new job at Georgetown University when she recieves a letter from a dead man asking to solve his murder. As she investigates the man's death, she is pulled into a twenty-year-old mystery involving a kidnapped child as well as the present-day death of Timothy Savage.

Kay Scarpetta and her colleague Pete Marino investigate the case of a man killed by a shotgun blast to the chest, while a woman is trapped in an abandoned house in the South after being kidnapped by an unknown captor.

Desperate to escape her life in America, Chicago forensic pathologist Margaret Campbell accepts an invitation to teach at the Beijing police university, and finds herself in the midst of an investigation that could prove disastrous.

Dr. Kay Scarpetta, who works as the senior forensic analyst for CNN, offers her services pro bono to the chief medical examiner of New York City, and when she becomes involved in a strange plot involving a famous actor and is asked to launch her own television show, she worries about her future as a professional.