Kay Scarpetta and her colleague Pete Marino investigate the case of a man killed by a shotgun blast to the chest, while a woman is trapped in an abandoned house in the South after being kidnapped by an unknown captor, and on Cape Cod, Kay's niece Lucy Farinelli begins to suspect that she has made a terrible mistake.

The carefully orchestrated life of Manhattan emergency room doctor and witness-protection program participant Peter Brown unravels in the course of a day that begins with a mugging and a new patient who knows him from his previous existence.

Chairing a subcommittee aimed at banning new cloning technology, Senator Ashley Butler clashes with scientist Daniel Lowell, until Butler develops Parkinson's disease and joins with Lowell to prematurely harness the new technology.

When Boston-based Dr. Craig Bowman is served with a summons for medical negligence, he's shocked, enraged, and more than a little humiliated. A devoted physician who has endured grueling years of training and worked continuously in the service of others, he is now a partner in an exclusive concierge medical practice. No longer forced to see more and more patients while spending less and less time with each one just to keep his office door open, he...

Paul Madriani has ample reason to suspect he's representing a guilty man. Dr. David Crone, a respected medical researcher and principal in mapping the human genome, is charged with the murder of a young colleague: twenty-six-year-old Kalista Jordan, an African-American research physician whose body washed up on a beach in San Diego Bay. Forensic evidence links her murder with material in Crone's garage. Crone had both opportunity and motive: Kalista...

Months after foiling an international terrorist attack, Doctors Without Borders physician Jonathan Ransom is working under an assumed name in a remote corner of Africa. His wife, Emma, desperate to escape the wrath of Division, the secret American intelligence agency she betrayed, has been in hiding. Both look forward to sharing a stolen weekend in London?until a terrorist attack ruins their romantic rendezvous. In the aftermath, Emma disappears...

When Dr. Rennie Newton is summoned to jury duty, she brings to the courtroom the same level of competence that she displays in the operating room. Her commitment to precision compels her to deliver a not guilty verdict in the murder case against notorious contract killer Ricky Lozada. Her carefully structured life begins to crumble when a rival colleague is brutally slain. Lozada's menacing shadow looms over the murder, but it's Rennie the investigators...