Patricia Cornwell

"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 deliberate to be the killer's first...

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...

Now freelancing from south Florida, Dr. Kay Scarpetta returns to her old haunts in Richmond, Virginia, only to encounter a host of baffling and unwelcome surprises as she investigates the death of a fourteen-year-old girl.

Young lovers are disappearing in Richmond, Virginia, only to be found later as mutilated corpses. Following a macabre trail of evidence that ties the present homicides to a grisly crime in the past, Dr. Kay Scarpetta must track down a murderer before another missing couple become the next victims.

Massachusetts state investigator Win Garano is dispatched to Watertown by District Attorney Monique Lamont to look into a cold case that just may be the Boston Strangler's first victim, but he runs up against opposition from the Front, an unofficial coalition of police departments who are suspicious of Lamont, her minions, and her motivations.

Relocating to Charleston after a particularly grueling case, Dr. Kay Scarpetta opens a private forensic pathology practice but is quickly targeted by local politics and a covert saboteur before a series of violent deaths bring her skills into high view.

Chief Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta investigates the murder of a reclusive author and discovers that forensic pathology is more than laboratory work when she becomes involved in a dangerous criminal investigation.

Medical examiner Kay Scarpetta becomes involved in a strange murder mystery when she tries to discover who is committing a string of gruesome murders, but she soon realizes that someone would rather have her dead than completing her investigation.

Medical examiner Kay Scarpetta's investigation of a killer who uses fire to hide his crimes turns personal when she learns that her old nemesis, Carrie Grethen, is somehow involved.