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, the Cambridge Forensic Center's director and chief, decides at the scene that this is no accidental act of God. Her investigation becomes complicated when she begins receiving a flurry...

A sadistic serial killer, the weapon a deadly virus Dublin, Ireland and Richmond, Virginia: separated by thousands of miles - linked by murder. For Dr Kay Scarpetta a lecture stint in Ireland provides the perfect opportunity to find out if the murders on both sides of the Atlantic are indeed connected. Five dismembered, beheaded bodies were found in Ireland five years ago - now four have been discovered in the States. But the tenth corpse in Virginia...

Virginia's chief medical examiner Kay Scarpetta matches wits with a wily killer who uses fire to mask his crimes. The case begins with a fire in which many horses die and the embers yield a human body.

"#1 New York Times bestselling author Patricia Cornwell delivers the next enthralling thriller in her high-stakes series starring Kay Scarpetta--a complex tale involving a serial sniper who strikes chillingly close to the forensic sleuth herself. It's Dr. Kay Scarpetta's birthday, and she's about to head to Miami for a vacation with Benton Wesley, her FBI profiler husband, when she notices seven pennies on a wall behind their Cambridge house. Is this...

11:05 p.m. Convicted murderer Ronnie Joe Waddell is pronounced dead in the Commonwealth of Virginia's electric chair. His death is not the only newsworthy event on this cold December night. Three hours after young Eddie Heath goes out to buy a can of soup, his nude, grotesquely wounded body is found propped against a dumpster. The two events seem unrelated until chief medical examiner Kay Scarpetta remembers that Waddell arranged his victim in a strikingly...

Former South Carolina forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta takes a case in New York in which a patient in a psychiatric prison asks to speak to her about wounds he claims were inflicted during a murder he did not commit, and after talking with the man, she starts to believe he is telling the truth and a serial killer is on the loose.

"Chief medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta finds herself a reluctant star witness in a sensational televised murder trial causing chaos in Old Town Alexandria with the threat of violent protests. Forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta has just inherited one of the most notorious cases of her career. Two years ago, a former beauty queen's body washed up on the shore of Wallops Island, Virginia. She was last seen on a boat with her fiancé, who has since...

"Dr. Kay Scarpetta is working a suspicious death scene in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when she receives a text message with a video link that appears to be from her niece Lucy. But how can it be? It's clearly a surveillance film of Lucy taken almost twenty years ago. As Scarpetta watches she comes to grips with frightening secrets. That first clip and others sent soon after raise dangerous implications that increasingly isolate Scarpetta, leaving her...