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...

"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...

In Charlotte, North Carolina, a homicidal woman is murdering visiting businessmen and painting their genitals orange. The hunt for the killer is led by two women, one the city's chief of police, the other her deputy, and they are accompanied by a young newspaper reporter, eager to earn his spurs.

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...

Medical examiner Kay Scarpetta tries to find out who has been stalking pairs of young lovers in the woodlands of Virginia.