Dr. Laura Powell

Sakima, New York, a sleepy, idyllic city nestled in the Hudson Valley, a place where everyone knows each other, families look after the highly prized community garden, and the crime rate is so low that Dr. Laura Powell, the police department’s medical examiner, spends most of her time tending to her own private medical practice. That changes drastically the day a local high school student is found dead, an apparent suicide. Called in to perform the autopsy, Laura uncovers a strange growth inside the body that leads to a horrifying discovery.

Medical Examiner Dr. Laura Powell didn't think anything could be more frightening than what she uncovered in an autopsy a year ago. Yet, in this chilling sequel to Nicholas Kaufmann’s best-selling The Hungry Earth, the cause of death is literally petrifying. When a completely petrified corpse ends up on her autopsy table, Laura is convinced it must be a fossil, but the evidence says otherwise. Impossibly, the man on her table died in a car crash earlier that day. But what could cause a human body to transform so quickly from flesh to a hard, stonelike substance?

Over the years, Dr. Laura Powell has seen things in her morgue that no one has ever seen before—a corpse filled with an unknown fungus, a body completely petrified mere moments after death—but she's never had a dead body wake up on the autopsy table. Until now. Environmental scientist Jordan Mintz was pronounced dead after suffering a mysterious illness. Now, suddenly, he finds himself alive once more, but changed. Plagued by visions of worms and an unforgiving, insatiable hunger, he wonders if he's the same man he was before.