Patricia Daniels Cornwell

Forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta has come almost full circle, returning to Virginia as the chief medical examiner, the state where she launched her storied career. Just weeks on the job, she’s called to a scene by railroad tracks where a woman’s body has been shockingly displayed, her throat cut down to the spine. As Scarpetta begins to follow the trail, it leads unnervingly close to her own neighborhood. At the same time, a catastrophe occurs...

Kay Scarpetta accepts an assignment in New York City examining an injured man at the psychiatric prison ward. Oscar Bane, chained and handcuffed, had specifically asked for Scarpetta and as the interview begins, the story Oscar relates is the most peculiar tale Kay has ever heard.

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 twenty years ago. As Scarpetta watches she begins to learn frightening secrets about her niece, whom she has loved and raised like a daughter. That film clip...

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.

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.

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 fianče, 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...

A Massachusetts DA who is running for governor looks for a way to employ cutting-edge DNA technology to fight crime, but when a shocking piece of violence intervenes, her state investigator is not so sure it is a random event.

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 a kids' game? 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...

In At Risk, Patricia Cornwell introduced shrewd Massachusetts state investigator Win Garano, hard-charging D.A. Monique Lamont, and Garano's grandmother, who has certain unpredictable talents you ignore at your peril. And in The Front, peril is what comes to them all when Lamont sends Garano on a special job as part of a new public relations campaign. Garano senses a much deeper agenda but he has no idea how deep it goes.

In the aftermath of a NASA rocket launch gone terribly wrong, Captain Calli Chase comes face-to-face with her missing twin sister as well as the startling truth of who they really are. Now, a top secret program put in motion years ago has spun out of control, and only Calli can redirect its course. Aided by cutting-edge technologies, the NASA investigator and scientist turned Space Force pilot sets out on a frantic search for the missing link between...