Forensic Mysteries

Seven years after making her escape from an abusive marriage, Dr. Annabelle Schwartzman is settling into her position as medical examiner in the city of San Francisco. Doing what she loves, she can almost put the trauma of her past behind her—until she confronts the case of a young woman, 16 weeks pregnant. Everything about the case says the woman took her own life. As hard as Schwartzman tries to make peace with the evidence in her head, something about the case won’t leave her alone. She’s all too aware of how similar the circumstances are to her own past.

Something sits in a bunker lab buried 50 feet below the grounds of Lakehurst Naval Air Station. The product of the Lange-Tür technology confiscated from the Germans after World War II occupies a chamber of steel-reinforced ballistic glass. Despite experimentation for nearly three-quarters of a century, no one knows what it is, but illegal human research reveals what it can do. Humans with special abilities have been secretly collected - abilities that can only have come from whatever occupies the underground bunker in Lakehurst.

Here, Michael Palmer has created a cat-and-mouse game where one woman must confront a conspiracy of doctors to uncover an evil practice that touches every single person who ever has a medical test. With unforgettable characters and twists and betrayals that come from the most unlikely places, The Second Opinion will keep you guessing...and looking over your shoulder.

When the skeleton of a young girl, not yet a teenager, is discovered in Acadia, Canada, Tempe Brennan is reminded of Evangelina, her best friend in her preteen years, who was mysteriously taken away when she was 12. Evangelina was from strange and faraway Acadia. She was named after Evangeline in the Longfellow poem, and loved poetry. Tempe found her exotic and glamorous, and then suddenly she was gone, and Tempe was told not to try to find her, that she was "dangerous".

Her body floats. A bloated thing half atop the river. Naked. Pale. Mouth and eyes open wide. When two fishermen discover a corpse floating in the Clackamas river, profiler Violet Darger heads to rural Oregon to hunt another serial killer. What she discovers in the woods might change the course of her life. What secrets does the water conceal? The girl in the water marks the third such case in the area - all drowned with superficial stab wounds and discovered in a body of water - and Darger feels certain she won't be the last. The corpses are badly decomposed.

Inside Boston Doctors Hospital, patients are dying. In the glare of the operating room, they survive the surgeon's knife. But in the dark, hollow silence of the night, they die. Suddenly, inexplicably, horribly. A tough, bright doctor will risk his very life for a dedicated young nurse who unknowingly holds the answers.

When Dr. Alex Taylor opens her eyes, she is hooked up to an IV, is bound to an operating table, and her legs are raised in stirrups. Disoriented and alarmed, she assumes she's been anesthetized and brought to surgery after being in an accident. But the man standing over her is no doctor she recognizes at the hospital where she works as a successful and respected doctor. He’s a stranger - and he’s calmly and methodically telling her how he's about to attack her. Before Alex can even scream for help, she succumbs to another dose of anesthesia, rendering her unable to defend herself.

"The body you are wearing used to be mine." So begins the letter Myfanwy Thomas is holding when she awakes in a London park surrounded by bodies all wearing latex gloves. With no recollection of who she is, Myfanwy must follow the instructions her former self left behind to discover her identity and track down the agents who want to destroy her. She soon learns that she is a Rook, a high-ranking member of a secret organization called the Checquy that battles the many supernatural forces at work in Britain.

Helena Flemming has fallen out of love with John Eisenmenger and wants their relationship to end. Eisenmenger is devastated and finds solace in returning to his life as a forensic pathologist. His first case reunites him with DI Beverley Wharton; a young petty criminal is found stabbed and the obvious suspect is a man who had threatened to kill him just hours before. There is pressure on Beverley to close the case.

When Wynter Roth is turned out of New Earth, a self-contained doomsday cult on the American prairie, she emerges into a world poised on the brink of madness as a mysterious outbreak of rapid early onset dementia spreads across the nation. As Wynter struggles to start over in a world she’s been taught to regard as evil, she finds herself face-to-face with the apocalypse she’s feared all her life - until the night her sister shows up at her doorstep with a set of medical samples.

Longbill Beach, 1982. Emily Vaughn gets ready for prom night, the highlight of any high school experience. But Emily has a secret. And by the end of the evening, she will be dead. Forty years later, Emily’s murder remains unsolved. Her friends closed ranks, her family retreated inwards, the community moved on. But all that’s about to change.

College-age girls with long red hair. Brutally murdered, they're posed like victims in a film noir. Each crime scene is eerily similar to the twisted fantasy of a serial killer now serving thirty years to life—a criminal brought to justice with the help of Forensic Instincts.

Governments across the globe have failed to stop the spread of the Oni Agent. The biological weapon continues to wreak havoc. Those that are infected become abominations known as Skulls, a fate worse than death. Captain Dominic Holland and Meredith Webb have made it to Fort Detrick. The Army base was once a bastion for America's biodefense. Now, swarms of hungry Skulls prowl outside the walls.

When Mark Hartmann is asked to perform a post-mortem on a lab assistant killed by cancer, everything looks straightforward. But his initial findings are surprising: Millicent Sweet appears to have died of several different, aggressive tumours. Before he can discuss this with colleagues, he's called to a conference in Scotland. A serious error of judgement gives a pharmaceutical company a handle on him, and they threaten to expose his excesses unless he falsifies his report on Sweet.

When a colleague's patient suffers a bizarre reaction in the operating room, Luke Daulton, a newly minted anesthesiologist, volunteers to help. Despite the surgical team's best efforts, the patient succumbs to a rare anesthetic complication. Luke becomes perplexed, even suspicious, over their inability to save the woman. Is it possible that the diagnosis was wrong? Or, worse yet, was the diagnosis faked? Luke even wonders if his boss Dr. Katz is involved.

A devoted wife and mother faces the unimaginable as her life crumbles. Crystal Rigler seems to have a perfect marriage. Derek, her handsome and charismatic husband, and their adult daughter, Cordelia, are her whole world. In addition to her already busy life, Crystal supports the volunteer organization she and Derek started: STOP (Stop Transplants of Organs from Prisoners). STOP aims to end a new government policy of harvesting organs from executed prisoners. They learn that these organs are not distributed by the national transplant list, established to allocate organs fairly.

A man is murdered in a back alley. Renowned forensic detective Lincoln Rhyme and his partner, Amelia Sachs, are left with a veritable mountain of evidence collected from the trash-filled alley, and their only lead is a young eyewitness: the man's eight-year-old son, who was riding along on his father's delivery route.

Tortured and left for dead at 16, Evelyn Talbot turned her personal nightmare into her life’s work - studying the disturbing psychopathy of some of the world’s most vicious serial killers. Now a leading psychiatrist at Hanover House in a small Alaskan town, she tries to believe the past will never come back to haunt her - until a woman goes missing from a cabin nearby, and every clue points to the man who once brutalized her....

A classic winter's crime novel by one of the most highly regarded exponents of the genre. Victor Harleston awoke with uncharacteristic optimism. Today he would be rich at last. Half an hour later, he gulped down his breakfast coffee and pitched to the floor, gasping and twitching. When the doctor arrived, he recognised instantly that it was a fatal case of poisoning and called in Scotland Yard.

Two graduate students decide to solve their financial problems by becoming egg donors at an exclusive, highly profitable fertility clinic on Boston's North Shore. But second thoughts and curiosity prompt the two women to find out more about their donated eggs. Obtaining employment at the clinic under aliases, they soon discover the horrifying aims of its research, immediately putting their lives, and their sanity, irrevocably at risk.