A serial killer is on the loose in Richmond, Virginia. Three women have died, brutalized and strangled in their own bedroom. There is no pattern: the killer appears to strike at random - but always early on Saturday mornings. So when Dr Kay Scarpetta, chief medical officer, is awakened at 2.33 am, she knows the news is bad: there is a fourth victim. And she fears now for those that will follow unless she can dig up new forensic evidence to aid the...

Dr. Kay Scarpetta, now freelancing with the National Forensic Academy in Florida, takes charge of a case that stretches from steamy Florida to snowboundBoston, one 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 shadows, until now.

Dr. Kay Scarpetta is working a suspicious death scene in Cambridge, Massachusetts when an emergency alert sounds on her phone. A video link lands in her text messages and seems to be from her computer genius niece Lucy. But how can it be? It's clearly a surveillance film of Lucy taken almost twenty years ago. That film clip and then others sent soon after raise dangerous legal implications that increasingly isolate Scarpetta and leave her confused,...

A reclusive author, Beryl Madison finds no safe haven from months of menacing phone calls -- or the tormented feeling that her every move is being watched. When the writer is found slain in her own home, Kay Scarpetta pieces together the intricate forensic evidence -- while unwittingly edging closer to a killer waiting in the shadows.

D.A. Lamont has a special job for Garano. As part of a new public relations campaign about the dangers of declining neighborhoods, sheś sending him to Watertown to "come up with a drama," and she thinks she knows just the case that will serve. Garano is very skeptical, because he knows that Watertown is also the home base for a loose association of municipal police departments called the FRONT, set up in order that they dont́ have to be so dependent...

The mysterious death of Ted Eddings, an investigative reporter, and the murder of a morgue assistant driving her car lead medical examiner Kay Scarpetta, her niece, and police captain Pete Marino on the trail of a deadly supremacist group.

It is the week before Christmas. A tanking economy has prompted Dr. Kay Scarpetta—despite her busy schedule and her continuing work as the senior forensic analyst for CNN—to offer her services pro bono to New York City's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. In no time at all, her increased visibility seems to precipitate a string of unexpected and unsettling events. She is asked live on the air about the sensational case of Hannah Starr, who...

A treacherous path from Scarpetta's past merges with the high tech highway she now finds herself on. We travel back to the beginning of her professional career, when she enlisted in the Air Force to pay off her medical school debt and found herself ensnared in a gruesome case of what seemed to be vicious, racially motivated hate crimes against two Americans in South Africa. Now, more than twenty years and many career successes later, her secret military...

Kay must find a killer who uses fire to mask his crimes and when she learns that her old nemesis is somehow involved, the investigation becomes personal.

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...