Following the bestselling success of HORNET'S NEST and SOUTHERN CROSS, this is another irreverent portrait of politically driven law enforcement run amok.

The latest in the bestselling series featuring fiction's original pathologist, Dr Kay Scarpetta.

Introducing Winston Garano, a new character from the acclaimed creator of the Kay Scarpetta series, based on the NEW YORK TIMES serialisation.

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 story he has to tell her turns out to be one of the most bizarre she has ever heard.

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.

Massachusetts State Investigator Win Garano is given one of his most challenging cases yet when he is asked to investigate the death of a young British woman murdered more than forty years ago. Assumed to be a victim of the Boston Strangler, blind Janie Brolin was raped and left for dead in 1962.

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

Kay Scarpetta has arranged to meet an inmate at the high-security Georgia Prison for Women. The prisoner is a convicted sex offender and the mother of a vicious and diabolically brilliant killer. Against advice, Scarpetta is determined to hear this woman out - she believes she may hold some answers to the murder of her former deputy. But soon she finds connections to a string of grisly killings, including the slaughter of a Savannah family years earlier. She can see a pattern to these killings, but who is behind them and why? As she learns more, Scarpetta is compelled to conclude that this is...

Florida is full of predators, from the animals who thrive in its humid heat to the humans who stalk the air-conditioned malls, and they all give Dr Kay Scarpetta, now Director of Forensic Science and Medicine, the opportunity and the means to do what she does best - persuading the dead to speak to her.

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.