The latest in the internationally acclaimed Dr Kay Scarpetta series.

The 'book of the dead' is the morgue log in which all cases are entered. For Kay Scarpetta, however, it is about to have a new meaning. Fresh from her battle with a psychopath in Florida, Scarpetta moves to South Carolina and opens a private forensic pathology practice. A string of brutal killings shatters her dreams of a quiet life.

Dr Kay Scarpetta, now freelancing with the National Forensic Academy in Florida, takes charge of a case that stretches from steamy Florida to snowbound Boston; one that at first appears as unnerving as any she has ever faced. The teasing psychological clues lead Scarpetta and her team - Pete Marino, Benton Wesley, and Lucy Farinelli - to suspect that they are hunting someone with a cunning and malevolent mind whose secrets have kept them in the shadows,...

A serial killer is on the loose in Richmond, Virginia. Three women have died, brutalised and strangled in their own bedrooms. But there is no pattern. Dr Kay Scarpetta, chief medical officer, now fears for those who will follow.

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 seems to precipitate a string of dramatic and unsettling events.

Forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta has returned to Virginia as the chief medical examiner, inheriting not only an overbearing secretary, but a legacy of neglect - and potential corruption. She and her husband Benton Wesley, now a forensic psychologist with the U.S. Secret Service, have relocated to Old Town Alexandria where she's headquartered five miles from the Pentagon in a post-pandemic world that's been torn by civil and political unrest.After...

In Richmond, Virginia, young lovers are dying. So far, four couples in the area have disappeared, only to be found months later as mutilated corpses. When the daughter of the president's newest drug czar vanishes along with her boyfriend, Dr Kay Scarpetta knows time is short. Following a macabre trail of evidence that ties the present homicides to a grisly crime in the past, Kay must draw upon her own personal resources to track down a murderer who...

A farmhouse destroyed by fire. A body amongst the ruins. Dr Kay Scarpetta, Chief Medical Examiner and consulting pathologist for the federal law enforcement agency ATF, is called out to a farmhouse in Virginia which has been destroyed by fire. In the ruins of the house she finds a body which tells a story of a violent and grisly murder. The fire has come at the same time as another, even more incendiary horror: Carrie Grethen, a killer who nearly...