#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 businessman snatched from an Upper East Side street in broad daylight. A miniature hangman's noose left at the scene. A nine-year-old girl, the only witness to the crime. With a crime scene this puzzling, forensic expertise of the highest order is absolutely essential. Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs are called in to investigate. Soon the case takes a stranger turn: a recording surfaces of the victim being slowly hanged, his desperate gasps the...

Young men-tourists-have been disappearing on the islands of Turks and Caicos for years. Seven years ago, the first victim was found in a strange location with both hands cut off; the other visitors vanished without a trace. But, recently, tantalizing leads have emerged and only Tempe can unravel them. Maddeningly, the victims seem to have nothing in common-other than the strange locations where their bodies are eventually found, and the fact that...

"When a New York City construction crane mysteriously collapses, causing mass destruction and injury, Rhyme and Sachs are on the case. A political group claims responsibility for the sabotage and threatens another attack in twenty-four hours, unless its demands are met. The clock is ticking. Then a clue reveals to Rhyme that his nemesis, known as the Watchmaker, has come to town to fulfill his promise of murdering the criminalist. Now Rhyme and Sachs...

When Dr. Kay Scarpetta, freelancing from South Florida, returns to Richmond, Virginia, at the request of the recently appointed Chief Medical Examiner, who claims that he needs her help to solve a crime, 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 personal problems that he refuses to reveal; and a glamorous FBI agent meddles with the...

"Tempe is called to Washington, DC to analyze the victims of a deadly blaze. The devastated building is in Foggy Bottom, and Tempe becomes suspicious about the property's ownership when she delves into its history. Tempe learns that back in the thirties and forties the home was the hangout of a group of bootleggers and racketeers known as the Foggy Bottom Gang. This fact seems irrelevant until the son of a Foggy Bottom gang member is shot dead. As...

Dr. Tessa McGowan teams up with her estranged husband to find out who's kidnapping women and altering their faces to resemble real, life-size dolls.

"Reflecting on twenty years of investigating more than 5,500 death scenes, an NYC death investigator, the second woman ever hired for this role, shares how, in dealing with death every day, she learned surprising lessons about life--and how some of those lessons saved her from becoming a statistic herself"--

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...

Kay Scarpetta becomes embroiled in a surreal plot that includes a famous actor accused of an unthinkable sex crime and the disappearance of a beautiful millionairess with whom her niece Lucy seems to have shared a secret past. In the seventeenth installment of the Kay Scarpetta series, the police are stumped by a particularly baffling crime. After exhausting all leads, authorities implore the help of Scarpetta, now a CNN senior forensic analyst....