Massachusetts Chief Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta has just returned from working one of the worst mass murders in U.S. history when she's awakened at an early hour by Detective Pete Marino. A body, oddly draped in an unusual cloth, has just been discovered inside the sheltered gates of MIT and it's suspected the identity is that of missing computer engineer Gail Shipton, last seen the night before at a trendy Cambridge bar. It appears she's been...

Dr. Kay Scarpetta tries to discover whether five dismembered beheaded bodies found in Ireland years ago are connected to the four discovered in the United States, but when a fifth body is found with vital discrepancies, investigators suspect the killer is armed with smallpox.

It is the week before Christmas and Dr Kay Scarpetta has offered her services pro bono to New York Citys Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. But in no time at all, her increased visibility seems to precipitate a string of dramatic and unsettling events. She is asked live on the air about the sensational case of Hannah Starr, who has vanished and is presumed dead. Moments later during the same broadcast, she receives a startling call-in from...

An eminent paleontologist disappears from a dinosaur dig site, and Kay Scarpetta receives a grisly communication that gives her a dreadful reason to suspect this may become her next case. She just may be on her own this time--against an enormously powerful and cunning enemy who seems impossible to defeat.

Kay Scarpetta, stripped of her title and power and having left Richmond for Florida, attempts to help policewoman Nic Robillard with a Louisiana case involving abducted women.

Dr. Kay Scarpetta finds herself an object of suspicion and criminal investigation, and must struggle to make what she knows to be the truth prevail against mounting evidence to the contrary.

Dr. Kay Scarpetta, now freelancing with the National Forensic Academy in Florida, takes charge of a case that stretches from steamy Florida to snowbound Boston; one that at first appears as unnerving as any she has ever faced. The teasing psychological clues lead Scarpetta and her team -- Pete Marino, Benton Wesley, and Lucy Farinelli -- to suspect that they are hunting someone with a cunning and malevolent mind whose secrets have kept them in the...