Showing results by author "Patricia Cornwell"

Four young women have been found murdered—tortured and strangled in their own beds—all victims of the same brilliant monster. Using a skilled hand and the latest technology in forensic medicine, Kay Scarpetta begins the process of gathering the microscopic clues the latest battered body has to give.

Late one night Beryl Madison turns off her burglar alarm, puts down her gun and opens her door to the man who has stalked and terrorized her for months. Hours later, her brutally mutilated body lies in the city morgue. As Scarpetta begins searching for the microscopic clues to the killer’s identity, one question keeps nagging her: why did Beryl let him in?

In the quiet of twilight, on an early autumn day, 26-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 of bizarre poems from an anonymous cyberbully who calls himself Tailend Charlie.

Determined to find out what happened to her former deputy chief, Jack Fielding, murdered six months earlier, Kay Scarpetta travels to the Georgia Prison for Women, where an inmate has information not only on Fielding, but also on a string of grisly killings. The murder of an Atlanta family years ago, a young woman on death row, and the inexplicable deaths of homeless people as far away as California seem unrelated. But Scarpetta discovers connections that compel her to conclude that what she thought ended with Fielding's death and an attempt on her own life is only the beginning....

A serial killer is stalking Virginia’s young lovers, taking their lives and taunting police with a single clue: a jack of hearts. For two years, the meaning of this card has eluded FBI investigators. But as Scarpetta begins searching the victims’ remains for microscopic clues, she begins to suspect that someone in the FBI knows more about the murderer.

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 strike.

Following the post mortem of a stowaway that reveals neither cause of death nor identity, Dr. Kay Scarpetta travels to Paris in search of information. In Paris she is given a secret mission--one that could ruin her career.

The body of an elderly woman is found dismembered in a Virginia landfill. Scarpetta initially believes the clues mirror that of a serial killer she's tracked before. But upon further investigation, she discovers puzzling pox-like erruptions on the woman's body that, perhaps, point in another direction.

Dr. Kay Scarpetta is working a suspicious death scene 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 20 years ago. As Scarpetta watches she begins to learn frightening secrets about her niece. That film clip and others sent soon after raise dangerous legal implications that increasingly isolate Scarpetta and leave her confused, worried, and not knowing where to turn.

Vain and charismatic Walter Sickert made a name for himself as a painter in Victorian London. But the ghoulish nature of his art - as well as extensive evidence - points to another name, one that's left its bloody mark on the pages of history: Jack the Ripper. Cornwell has collected never-before-seen archival material - including a rare mortuary photo, personal correspondence and a will with a mysterious autopsy clause - and applied cutting-edge forensic science to open an old crime to new scrutiny.

When an executed murderer’s fingerprints turn up at a new crime scene, Kay Scarpetta investigates. Prepare for the kind of riveting suspense this best-selling author delivers so well.

A woman has vanished while digging a dinosaur bone bed in the remote wilderness of Canada. Somehow, the only evidence has made its way to the inbox of Chief Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta, over 2,000 miles away, in Boston. She has no idea why. But as events unfold with alarming speed, Scarpetta begins to suspect that the paleontologist's disappearance is connected to a series of crimes - much closer to home: a gruesome murder, inexplicable tortures, and trace evidence from the last living creatures of the dinosaur age.

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 a kids' game? If so, why are all of the coins dated 1981 and so shiny they could be newly minted? Her cellphone rings, and Detective Pete Marino tells her there's been a homicide five minutes away. A high school music teacher has been shot with uncanny precision as he unloaded groceries from his car.

Physically and psychologically bruised by her encounter with the killer Chandonne, Dr. Kay Scarpetta has to leave her home in the hands of the police team investigating the attack. She finds shelter with an old friend, Anna Zenner, but it is not the haven of security she needs when she discovers that Anna has been subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury that is investigating Scarpetta for murder. Kay knows she is being framed, and she knows she can trust no one.

Fresh from her bruising battle with a psychopath in Florida, Scarpetta decides it's time for a change of pace. Moving to Charleston, South Carolina, she opens a unique private forensic pathology practice, one in which she and her colleagues, including Pete Marino and her niece, Lucy, offer expert crime-scene investigation and autopsy services to communities lacking local access to competent death investigation and modern technology.

In this fast-paced story, 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.

On a quiet day, away from the hustle of Richmond, in a small cottage on the Virginia coast, Dr. Kay Scarpetta receives a disturbing phone call from the Chesapeake police. Thirty feet deep in the murky waters of Virginia's Elizabeth River, a scuba diver's body is discovered near the Inactive Naval Shipyard.

Convicted serial killer Carrie Grethen has escaped from a psychiatric hospital with plans for revenge. Wary and shaken, Scarpetta also has to investigate the death by fire of an unknown woman. The post mortem reveals that the woman was stabbed before the fire was started, and soon Scarpetta and her colleagues are called out to the scene of another fire and another murder.

Dr. Kay Scarpetta has left Virginia in search of peace but instead finds herself drawn into baffling, horrific murders in Florida, where she becomes entangled in an international conspiracy that confronts her with the shock of her life.

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.