Forensic Mysteries

In this quick-hitting thriller set in Baltimore, during the waning years of the Cold War, Lussi Sim, a Norwegian physician, is the medical director of a newborn intensive care unit. Lussi had practiced pediatrics near her parents in Oslo until her father suffered a stroke. Growing up, Lussi experienced chronic mental trauma in the self-assigned role of her mother’s bodyguard. Ironically, her father’s stroke removed the physical threat to her mother and enabled Lussi to pursue her long-suppressed goal to train as a newborn intensive care subspecialist in the United States.

There are 206 bones in the human body. Forensic anthropologists know them intimately, can read in them stories of brief or long lives and use them to reconstruct every kind of violent end. 206 Bones opens with Tempe regaining consciousness and discovering that she is in some kind of very small, very dark, very cold enclosed space. She is bound, hands to feet. Who wants Tempe dead, or at least out of the way, and why? Tempe begins slowly to reconstruct...

In an ancient tunnel underneath New York City a charnel house is discovered. Inside are 36 bodies all murdered and mutilated more than a century ago. While FBI agent Pendergast investigates the old crimes, identical killings start to terrorize the city. The nightmare has begun. Again.

In the lockdown ward of a psychiatric hospital, Dr. Nadine Lavoie is in her element. She has the tools to help people, and she has the desire: Healing broken families is what she lives for. But Nadine doesn’t want to look too closely at her own past because there are whole chunks of her life that are black holes. It takes all her willpower to tamp down her recurrent claustrophobia, and her daughter, Lisa, is a runaway who has been on the streets for seven years. When a distraught woman, Heather Simeon, is brought into the Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit after a suicide attempt, Nadine gently coaxes her story out of her - and learns of some troubling parallels to her own life.

Eve Duncan returns in a thriller that pits her against the most evil mind she has ever encountered: a ruthless killer who taunts her with his every move...and who has a special affinity for blood. When a Georgia senator's daughter is found murdered, and her body drained of blood, Eve Duncan is drawn into the web of Kevin Jelak - a serial murderer who is on Eve's short list of killers who might know something about her missing daughter Bonnie.

If the biblical plagues of Egypt truly happened—could they happen again—on a global scale? Two years after vanishing into the Sudanese desert, Professor Harold McCabe comes stumbling out of the sands, but he dies before he can tell his story. Then an autopsy uncovers a bizarre corruption: someone had begun to mummify the professor's body—while he was still alive. Subsequently, the medical team who had performed the man's autopsy has fallen ill with an unknown disease. Fearing the worst, a colleague of the professor reaches out to Painter Crowe, the director of Sigma Force. The call is urgent, for Professor McCabe had vanished into the desert while searching for proof of the ten plagues of Moses.

In Trace, Scarpetta travels to Richmond, Virginia, at the odd behest of the recently appointed Chief Medical Examiner, who claims that he needs her help to solve a perplexing crime. When she arrives, however, Scarpetta finds that nothing is as she expected: her former lab is in the final stages of demolition; the inept chief isn't the one who requested her after all; her old assistant chief has developed personal problems that he won't reveal; and a glamorous FBI agent, whom Marino dislikes instantly, meddles with the case.

Edgar Award winner Jonathan Kellerman once more explores the corruption of California's golden coast and produces a novel of complex characterizations and nonstop suspense. By the time psychologist Dr. Alex Delaware reached the school the damage was done: A sniper had opened fire on a crowded playground, but was gunned down before any children were hurt. While the TV news crews feasted on the scene and Alex began his therapy sessions with the traumatized children, he couldn't escape the image of a slight teenager clutching an oversized rifle.

The dead can't speak to us, Professor Madoc had said. But that was a lie. The body Patrick Fort is examining in anatomy class is trying to tell him all kinds of things. But no one hears what he does, and no one understands when he tries to tell them. Life is already strange enough for Patrick - being a medical student with Asperger's Syndrome doesn't come without its challenges. And that's before he is faced with solving a possible murder, especially when no one believes a crime has even taken place.

The Book of the Dead is the morgue log, the ledger in which all cases are entered by hand. For Kay Scarpetta, however, it is about to acquire a new meaning. A sixteen-year-old tennis star, fresh from a tournament win Charleston, is found nude and mutilated near Piazza Navona in Rome. The body of an abused young boy is dumped in a desolate marsh. A woman is ritualistically murdered in her multimillion-dollar beach home.

Medical examiner Laura Hanning has two charred corpses and no answers. Both bear mysterious tattoos but exhibit no known cause of death. Their only connection to one another is a string of puzzling miracle cures. Her preliminary investigation points to a cult in the possession of the fabled panacea - the substance that can cure all ills - but that's impossible.

On her quest to find out exactly what happened to her former deputy chief, Jack Fielding, murdered six months before, Scarpetta drives to the Georgia Prison for Women to meet a convicted sex offender and the mother of a vicious and diabolically brilliant killer. Against the advice of her FBI criminal intelligence agent husband, Benton Wesley, Scarpetta is determined to hear this woman out.

Bullied, overlooked and under-appreciated, Lissa McColl learns at an early age to do very bad things. As a nurse, she is respected and valued for the first time in her life. But Lissa hates her job and the selfish, rude and inconsiderate people she has to deal with. But being underestimated in this job had its advantages. Lissa can get close to people, find out their secrets… sometimes with deadly results.

Step back into the gaslit alleys of Victorian London, where a shadow known only as Jack the Ripper unleashed a reign of terror that haunts us to this day. In the autumn of 1888, the impoverished district of Whitechapel became the hunting ground for a phantom. A series of brutal, ritualistic murders of destitute women exposed the dark underbelly of the world's wealthiest empire and launched one of the most intense and frustrating manhunts in history. The killer was never caught, leaving behind a terrifying legend and a perfect, unsolved mystery. This meticulously researched book cuts through...

Twenty-eight-year-old Sean McGillin is the picture of health, until he fractures his leg while in-line skating in New York City's Central Park. Within 24 hours of his surgery, he dies.

Master Sergeant Reed Beckham has led his Delta Force Team, codenamed Ghost, through every kind of hell imaginable and never lost a man. When a top-secret Medical Corps research facility goes dark, Team Ghost is called in to face their deadliest enemy yet - a variant strain of Ebola that turns men into monsters.

It is a case unlike any psychologist Dr. Alex Delaware has ever encountered. Five-year-old Woody Swope is ill, but the real problem is his parents. They refuse to agree to the one treatment that could save this boy's life. Alex sets out to convince Mr. and Mrs. Swope - only to find that the parents have left the hospital and taken their son with them. Worse, the sleazy motel room where the Swopes were staying is empty - except for the ominous bloodstain. The Swopes and their son have vanished into the sordid shadows of the city.

Eleven years ago, the Co-ed Slayer murdered nine female students on the Oregon State University campus. Lacey Campbell barely escaped his attack, but lost her best friend whose remains were never found. As the sole surviving victim, Lacey helped send the sadistic serial killer to prison for life. Now a forensic odontologist examining teeth and bones for the state Medical Examiner, Lacey is devastated when she arrives at a crime scene and identifies the skeletal remains as her college friend’s.

DC Heart surgeon Dr. Steven Leeds is suddenly besieged by a handful of immensely complicated heart attack and stroke cases, all caused by a rare arterial injury—a dissection. Private detective Kirk Miner and FBI agent Jack Mulville investigate, and they immediately suspect Leeds’ former lover, who harbors a grudge against all the victims. Then when prominent people in the US government begin to experience these same deadly cardiac emergencies, it falls to the unlikely team of three to snuff out a catastrophic plot that only the medically astute can divine.

Just as 200,000 fans are pouring into town for Race Week, a body is found in a barrel of asphalt next to the Charlotte Motor Speedway. The next day, a NASCAR crew member comes to Temperance Brennan’s office at the Mecklenburg County Medical Examiner to share a devastating story. Twelve years earlier, Wayne Gamble’s sister, Cindi, then a high school senior and aspiring racer, disappeared along with her boyfriend, Cale Lovette. Lovette kept company with a group of right-wing extremists known as the Patriot Posse.