Leaving behind her forensic pathology practice in South Carolina, Kay Scarpetta takes up an assignment in New York City, where the NYPD has asked her to examine an injured patient in a psychiatric ward. The handcuffed and chained patient, Oscar Bane, has specifically asked for her, and he begins to talk. He says his injuries were sustained in the course of a murder... that he did not commit.

Florida is full of predators, from the animals who thrive in its heat to the humans who stalk the malls, and they all give Dr. Kay Scarpetta, a forensics specialist, the opportunity and the means to do what she does best: persuading the dead to speak to her.

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.

Against her own judgement, Kay Scarpetta agrees to return to Virginia as a consultant pathologist on the case involving the death of a 14-year-old girl. Soon Kay is investigating the probability that someone is after those closest to her.

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.

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?

Virginia's Chief Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta is under suspicion and criminal investigation. And the nightmare perpetuated on Scarpetta's doorstep continues as she discovers that the so-called Werewolf murders may have extended to New York City and into the darkest corners of her past.

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.

It's a sunny morning in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and also Dr. Kay Scarpetta's birthday. 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 home. Is this a kids' game? And 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 uncanny precision as he unloaded groceries from his car. Yet no one has heard or seen a thing.

Carrie Grethen, partner in crime to William Temple Gault, has escaped from prison. Before she does so she sends a message to Kay Scarpetta blaming her for Gault's death, and has specific plans for revenge.

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 20 years ago. As Scarpetta watches she begins to learn frightening secrets about her beloved niece that raise dangerous legal implications, leaving Scarpetta confused, worried, and unable to turn to Lucy, her FBI husband Benton Wesley, or her investigative partner Pete Marino.

In the quiet of twilight, on an early autumn day, 26-year-old Elisa Vandersteel is killed while riding her bicycle along the Charles River. It appears she was struck by lightning - except the weather is perfectly clear with not a cloud in sight. Dr. Kay Scarpetta, the Cambridge Forensic Center's director and chief, decides at the scene that this is no accidental Act of God.

Dublin, Ireland and Richmond, Virginia: separated by thousands of miles - linked by murder. Five dismembered, beheaded bodies were found in Ireland five years ago - now four have been discovered in the States. But the tenth corpse in Virginia is different. A copy-cat killing. Ghoulish, perhaps, but not unusual. Then abject terror grips Scarpetta and her colleagues when the next body is found with a clear and horrifying message: the killer is armed with the most lethal weapon on earth - smallpox.

On a quiet day, away from the hustle of Richmond, in a small cottage on the Virginia coast, Dr. Kay Scarpetta receives a disturbing phone call from the Chesapeake police. Thirty feet deep in the murky waters of Virginia's Elizabeth River, a scuba diver's body is discovered near the Inactive Naval Shipyard.