The United States government is given a warning by the preeminent biophysicists in the country: current sterilization procedures applied to returning space probes may be inadequate to guarantee uncontaminated re-entry to the atmosphere. Two years later, seventeen satellites are sent into the outer fringes of space to "collect organisms and dust for study." One of them falls to earth, landing in a desolate area of Arizona. Twelve miles from the landing...

When patients mysteriously take a turn for the worse at San Francisco Medical Center, Lieutenant Lindsay Boxer and the Women's Murder Club must face an unspeakable menace, possibly the most terrifying situation they have encountered.

"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...

Examines the experiences of the children and husband of Henrietta Lacks, who, twenty years after her death from cervical cancer in 1951, learned doctors and researchers took cells from her cervix without consent which were used to create the immortal cell line known as the HeLa cell; provides an overview of Henrietta's life; and explores issues of experimentation on African-Americans and bioethics.

McMurphy, a criminal who feigns insanity, is admitted to a mental hospital where he challenges the autocratic authority of the head nurse

Kay Scarpetta questions inmates at the Georgia Prison for Women looking to find out what happened to her former deputy chief, Jack Fielding, murdered six months earlier.

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...

Four friends--homicide inspector Lindsay Boxer, medical examiner Claire Washburn, assistant district attorney Jill Bernhardt, and crime reporter Cindy Thomas--