"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...

Dr. Kay Scarpetta, who works as the senior forensic analyst for CNN, offers her services pro bono to the chief medical examiner of New York City, and when she becomes involved in a strange plot involving a famous actor and is asked to launch her own television show, she worries about her future as a professional.

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 two thousand 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,...

Forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta has just inherited one of the most notorious cases of her career. Two years ago, a former beauty queen's body washed up on the shore of Wallops Island, Virginia. She was last seen on a boat with her fiance, who has since been held in jail while awaiting trial. Scarpetta must act as the expert witness for the case--an investigation previously botched by another forensic pathologist. After a grueling cross-examination...

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...

A Massachusetts D. A. who is running for governor looks for a way to employ cutting-edge DNA technology to fight crime, but when a shocking piece of violence intervenes, her state investigator is not so sure it is a random event.