Patricia Daniels Cornwell

Forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta returns to Virginia as the chief medical examiner. It's the state where she launched her career, but her new job means she's inherited not only an overbearing secretary, but also a legacy of neglect and potential corruption. Called to a scene by railroad tracks where a woman's body has been shockingly displayed, her throat cut down to the spine, Scarpetta's investigation leads close to her own historic neighborhood....

Kay Scarpetta's new private forensic lab is not welcomed in Charleston and it doesn't help when her investigation into the death of U.S. tennis star, Drew Martin, connects to the body of an unidentified South Carolina boy.

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...

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...

When the bodies of young courting couples start turning up in remote woodland areas, Dr Kay Scarpetta's task is made more difficult by the effects of the elements. But when the daughter of a powerful woman goes missing, Kay becomes prey to pressure.

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...

In the aftermath of a NASA rocket launch gone terribly wrong, Captain Calli Chase comes face-to-face with her missing twin sister - as well as the startling truth of who they really are. Now, a top secret program put in motion years ago has spun out of control, and only Calli can redirect its course. Aided by cutting-edge technologies, the NASA investigator and scientist turned Space Force pilot sets out on a frantic search for the missing link between...

"Killing me won't kill the beast" are the last words of rapist-murderer Ronnie Joe Waddell, written four days before his execution. But they can't explain how medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta finds Waddell's fingerprints on another crime scene--after she'd performed his autopsy. If this is some sort of game, Scarpetta seems to be the target. And if the next victim is someone she knows, the punishment will be cruel and unusual ...