"#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,...

Leaving behind her Charleston forensic pathology practice to accept an assignment in New York City, Kay Scarpetta learns the story of an injured psychiatric patient who claims he was attacked by a stalker who was killing someone else at the time.

Boston medical examiner Maura Isles's SUV stalls on a mountain road, leaving her and her friends to seek refuge in the seemingly abandoned village called Kingdom Come, but when Boston homicide detective Jane Rizzoli receives word that Maura's charred body was discovered in a ravine, she sets out to hunt down the killer and unravel the secrets concerning Maura's fate.

Julia Hamill is pulled into a nineteenth-century mystery when she discovers a human skull bearing the signs of a violent death in her backyard.

Kay Scarpetta and her colleague Pete Marino investigate the case of a man killed by a shotgun blast to the chest, while a woman is trapped in an abandoned house in the South after being kidnapped by an unknown captor.

Desperate to escape her life in America, Chicago forensic pathologist Margaret Campbell accepts an invitation to teach at the Beijing police university, and finds herself in the midst of an investigation that could prove disastrous.

"Is she dead or alive? That is the question on everybody's lips. Eve appears to have been killed--that's what everyone attending her funeral thinks, at least. But not even some of her top-brass colleagues know for sure whether her death is a hoax--a way to ensnare her brutal captor, Jim Doane, once or for all. But even if Eve really is still alive, how much longer can this charade continue before she falls into even greater danger? CIA agent Catherine...

Relocating to Charleston after a particularly grueling case, Dr. Kay Scarpetta opens a private forensic pathology practice but is quickly targeted by local politics and a covert saboteur before a series of violent deaths bring her skills into high view.