Present day: Julia Hamill has made a horrifying discovery on the grounds of her new home in rural Massachusetts: a skull buried in the rocky soil--human, female, and, according to the trained eye of Boston medical examiner Maura Isles, scarred with the unmistakable marks of murder. Boston, 1830: In order to pay for his education, medical student Norris Marshall has joined the ranks of local "resurrectionists"--those who plunder graveyards and harvest...

Native American pathologist Birdy Waterman and sheriff's detective Kendall Stark go up against a female serial killer whose powers of persuasion seem to have no end, forcing the two to make a fateful decision.

"When a severed leg is found on the banks of the Thames, Dr. George Barnabas, female forensic pathologist and determined investigator, is summoned to the macabre scene. But with no sign of the rest of the body, she cannot say how the man died. Her next case is equally bizarre: a terribly burned woman in a first-floor flat--and the fireman thinks the fire started in the body itself."--Page 4 of cover.

From the bestselling author of The Bone Collector and Devil's Teardrop comes this spine-chilling new thriller that pits renowned criminalist Lincoln Rhyme against the ultimate opponent -- Amelia Sachs, his own brilliant protege. A quadriplegic since a beam crushed his spinal cord years ago, Rhyme is desperate to improve his condition and goes to the University of North Carolina Medical Center for high-risk experimental surgery. In a twenty-four hour...

"If you are reading this letter, I am dead and I would be most grateful if you could solve my murder..." When Owens receives a letter from a dead man imploring her to solve his murder, there's only one catch: Timothy Savage's death was so obviously the suicide of a demented individual that the case has been closed. A postmortem discovers clear signs that Savage was indeed murdered. And she finds DNA from a kidnapped child whose remains were recovered...

"#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...

When Dr. Kay Scarpetta, freelancing from South Florida, returns to Richmond, Virginia, at the request of the recently appointed Chief Medical Examiner, who claims that he needs her help to solve a crime, she finds that nothing is as she left it: her former lab is being demolished; the chief isn't really the one who requested her; her former assistant chief has personal problems that he refuses to reveal; and a glamorous FBI agent meddles with the...

Kay Scarpetta becomes embroiled in a surreal plot that includes a famous actor accused of an unthinkable sex crime and the disappearance of a beautiful millionairess with whom her niece Lucy seems to have shared a secret past. In the seventeenth installment of the Kay Scarpetta series, the police are stumped by a particularly baffling crime. After exhausting all leads, authorities implore the help of Scarpetta, now a CNN senior forensic analyst. Presented...

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...

Boston homicide detective Jane Rizzoli receives the grim news that Maura's charred body has been found in a mountain ravine. Shocked and grieving, Jane is determined to learn what happened to her friend. The investigation plunges Jane into the twisted history of Kingdom Come, Wyoming, where a gruesome discovery lies buried beneath the snow.