Patricia Daniels Cornwell

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 fianč, 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 grueling cross-examination...

#1 New York Times bestselling author Patricia Cornwell returns with the remarkable twenty-fourth thriller in her popular high-stakes series starring medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta. In the quiet of twilight, on an early autumn day, twenty-six-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,...

New Year's Eve and the final murder scene of Virginia's bloodiest year since the Civil War takes Scarpetta thirty feet below the Elizabeth River's icy surface. A scuba diver, Ted Eddings, is dead, an investigative reporter who was a favorite at the Medical Examiner's Office. Was Eddings probing the frigid depths of the Inactive Ship Yard for a story, or simply diving for sunken trinkets? And why did Scarpetta receive a phone call from someone reporting...

"#1 New York Times 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 Dr. Kay Scarpetta's birthday, and 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 Cambridge house. Is this...

Patricia Cornwell has a sixth sense about the men and women in blue. In Hornet's Nest, her page-turning novel about crime and police in Charlotte, North Carolina, Cornwell moved behind the badges of these real-life heroes to uncover flesh-and-blood characters who strode through her pages to reveal vulnerable, passionate, brave, sometimes doubting, always fascinating figures.
In Southern Cross, Cornwell takes us even closer...

In Charlotte, North Carolina, a woman killer is murdering visiting businessmen and painting their genitals orange. The hunt for the killer is led by two women, one the city's chief of police, the other her deputy, and they are accompanied by a young newspaper reporter, eager to earn his spurs.

Virginia's chief medical examiner Kay Scarpetta matches wits with a wily killer who uses fire to mask his crimes. The case begins with a fire in which many horses die and the embers yield a human body.

Kay Scarpetta steps over the threshold of a new life after her work as Virginia's Chief Medical Examiner comes to a jarring end.

International bestselling author Patricia Cornwell delivers pulse-pounding thrills in the first book in a series featuring a brilliant and unusual new heroine, cutting-edge cybertechnology, and stakes that are astronomically high. On the eve of a top secret space mission, Captain Calli Chase detects a tripped alarm in the tunnels deep below a NASA research center. A NASA pilot, quantum physicist, and cybercrime investigator, Calli knows that a looming...

"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...