Dr. Kay Scarpetta travels to North Carolina to investigate the murder of an eleven-year-old girl, but the evidence does not add up, and she must conduct a gruesome experiment at a remote research facility to find the answers, in a new edition of the classic thriller, complete with a new introduction by the author.

"#1 New York Times bestselling author Patricia Cornwell returns with the remarkable twenty-fourth thriller in her popular high-stakes series starring medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta. 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,...

After working one of the worst mass killings in U.S. history, Scarpetta returns home to Cambridge, Massachusetts, when she receives an unsettling call. The body of a young woman has been discovered on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's rugby field and physical evidence links the case to a series of uniquely weird homicides in Washington, D.C., where Scarpetta's FBI husband has been deployed to help capture a serial killer dubbed the Capital...

On the eve of a top secret space mission, Captain Calli Chase detects a tripped alarm in the tunnels deep below a NASA research center. A NASA pilot, quantum physicist, and cybercrime investigator, Calli knows that a looming blizzard and government shutdown could provide the perfect cover for sabotage, with deadly consequences.

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...

Forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta seeks to start life anew by moving to Charleston, South Carolina, and opening a private practice, but it's only a matter of time before she is investigating another string of death.

Dispatched by the district attorney to a declining Massachusetts neighborhood to address a case related to a new public relations campaign, state investigator Win Garano suspects a deeper agenda and becomes involved with a loosely organized association of vigilante police officers, in a case during which he is assisted by his intuitive grandmother.

New chief medical examiner and forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta is given a highly classified case involving two scientists who were found dead on a private space laboratory in the latest addition to the series following Chaos.