Kay Scarpetta

It is the week before Christmas. The effects of the credit crunch have prompted Dr Kay Scarpetta to offer her services pro bono to New York City’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. But in no time at all, her increased visibility precipitates a string of dramatic and unsettling events. She is asked live on the air about the sensational case of Hannah Starr, who has vanished and is presumed dead.

Kay Scarpetta has been training at the Dover Port Mortuary, mastering the art of ‘virtual autopsy’ - a groundbreaking procedure that could soon revolutionise forensic science. And it is not too long before these new skills urgently need to be put into practice. A young man drops dead, apparently from a heart condition, eerily close to Scarpetta’s home.

On her quest to find out exactly what happened to her former deputy chief, Jack Fielding, murdered six months before, Scarpetta drives to the Georgia Prison for Women to meet a convicted sex offender and the mother of a vicious and diabolically brilliant killer. Against the advice of her FBI criminal intelligence agent husband, Benton Wesley, Scarpetta is determined to hear this woman out.

In Alberta, Canada, an eminent paleontologist disappears from a dinosaur dig site, and at the Cambridge Forensic Center, Kay Scarpetta receives a grisly communication that gives her a dreadful reason to suspect this may become her next case. Then, with shocking speed, events begin to unfold. A body recovered from Boston Harbor reveals bizarre trace evidence hinting of a link to other unsolved cases that seem to have nothing in common. Who is behind all this? And whom can Scarpetta trust?

The body of a woman has been discovered inside the gates of MIT, draped in an unusual cloth. An examination reveals that the body is covered in a fine dust that under ultra-violet light fluoresces blood-red, emerald-green and sapphire-blue. As Kay Scarpetta pieces together the evidence, she draws herself and her team deeper into the dark world of designer drugs, drone technology and shocking corruption at the highest level.

No.1 bestselling author Patricia Cornwell delivers the next enthralling thriller in her high-stakes series starring Kay Scarpetta - a complex tale involving a serial sniper who strikes chillingly close to the forensic sleuth herself. It's Chief Medical Examiner Dr Kay Scarpetta's birthday, and while she's enjoying a leisurely morning, a man is shot dead five minutes from her house. The bullet tore through him as he unloaded groceries from his car. Yet nobody heard or saw a thing.

Number-one New York Times best-selling author Patricia Cornwell delivers the 23rd engrossing thriller in her high-stakes series starring medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta. Dr. Kay Scarpetta is working a suspicious death scene in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 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 twenty years ago.

Number one New York Times best-selling author Patricia Cornwell delivers the 24th engrossing thriller in her high-stakes series starring medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta.

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 fiancé, 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 gruelling cross-examination by the prosecutor, Scarpetta leaves the court only to discover that the sister of the judge on her case has been found dead.

The morning after North Virginia's deadliest Halloween on record, forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta is pulled away from her caseload to investigate a chilling crime. She arrives in the wilderness to find one body floating in the lake, and another twenty feet down an abandoned mineshaft - both mutilated almost beyond recognition. It can be no coincidence that the couple were killed on the verge of their arrest for cybercrimes. After the most terrifying body retrievals of her career, Scarpetta must discover who would commit murders this savage, and why.

Nobel laureate and advisor to the White House, Sal Giordano, is found dead in the middle of an abandoned theme park. When Virginia's chief medical examiner Dr Kay Scarpetta is alerted about the case, she's warned that the victim is someone she knows. When she hears who it is, she's devastated. While teaching in Rome for a summer during the early days of her career, she met Giordano. What began as an intense love affair evolved into a life-long friendship, and now he's suddenly and bizarrely dead.