Forensic Mystery Fiction

Everyone has a secret.... Only some lead to murder. Introducing Leo Stanhope: a Victorian transgender coroner's assistant who must uncover a killer without risking his own future. When the body of a young woman is wheeled into the hospital where Leo Stanhope works, his life is thrown into chaos. Maria, the woman he loves, has been murdered, and it is not long before the finger of suspicion is turned on him, threatening to expose his lifelong secret.

In Bones on Ice, forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan gets wrapped up in the ultimate cold case: a death on Mount Everest. It is called the “death zone”: the point on Everest, nearly five miles high, above which a climber cannot be rescued. More than 250 souls have lost their lives there. Most of the bodies remain, abandoned, frozen in place. When an earthquake leads to a miraculous recovery, Dr. Temperance Brennan is hired to identify the frozen mummified human corpse.

Julia Hamill has made a horrifying discovery on the grounds of her new home in rural Massachusetts: a skull buried in the rocky soil � human, female, and, according to the trained eye of Boston medical examiner Maura Isles, scarred with the unmistakable marks of murder.

For more than 13 years, special agent Winter Black has believed her little brother was dead - kidnapped and murdered by The Preacher, the same lunatic who killed her parents. A lead into Justin’s whereabouts brings her out of her hiatus to chase it, but other cases need her attention, too. At the FBI, tensions are high when a body is dug up, encased in a 55-gallon drum. The team soon realizes they aren’t hunting the typical serial killer, but a skilled surgeon.

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.

This collection contains books four to six in the gripping, fast-paced crime fiction series featuring DCI Whitney Walker and forensic psychologist Dr Georgina Cavendish: Lethal Secret, Last Breath, and Final Verdict.

On a cold February morning, ME Olivia Remington-Thorpe's severely beaten and bleeding husband stumbles onto Sheriff Elizabeth Benoit's retreat. Before slipping into unconsciousness, he begs her to find Olivia. Hours later, Deputy Detective Lila Dayne discovers a mysterious boneyard with dark secrets. The timing is catastrophic. Still reeling from the horrific events of the past autumn, the deputies of Eckardt County are spread thin, and tempers are short. Elizabeth's relationship with her lead investigator is sour. Still worse, her ex-husband moved back to Iowa with a devilish deal.

A mysterious electrical storm plunges Manhattan into darkness. As a strange, smothering fog rolls in, all communication crashes. In the blink of an eye, the island seems to vanish into a void. FBI special agent Jessica Blackwood and brilliant scientist Dr. Theo Cray know this isn’t a freak accident. It’s a sinister sleight of hand. Their greatest adversary, a serial killer and cultist known as the Warlock, has escaped during a prison transfer in New York. A depraved master of manipulation, he promised the end of days. He’s making good on it.

A small Georgia town erupts in panic when a young college professor is found brutally mutilated in the local diner. But it's only when town pediatrician and coroner Sara Linton does the autopsy that the full extent of the killer's twisted work becomes clear. Sara's ex-husband, Police Chief Jeffrey Tolliver, leads the investigation - a trail of terror that grows increasingly macabre when another local woman is found crucified a few days later.

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.

Women are turning up dead. And Lisa O'Malley digging into a crime means trouble is soon to follow. She's a forensic pathologist and mysteries are her domain. Audio book number three in the O'Malley series brings back Lisa O'Malley and U.S. Marshal Quinn Diamond from The Guardian in a tense investigative thriller. She's not a believer, and her journey toward faith is a fascinating look at how a forensic pathologist views the Resurrection. Quinn has found loving her is easier than keeping her safe.

When human bones are found beneath an old chapel in the woods, evidence suggests the remains could be linked to the decades-old case of missing teen Annalise Jansen. Homicide detective Jane Munro—pregnant and acutely attuned to the preciousness of life—hopes the grim discovery will finally bring closure to the girl’s family. But for a group of Annalise’s old friends, once dubbed the Shoreview Six by the media, it threatens to expose a terrible pledge made on an autumn night forty-seven years ago.

At an internment camp in Indonesia, 47 people are pronounced dead with acute hemorrhagic fever. When Henry Parsons - microbiologist, epidemiologist - travels there on behalf of the World Health Organization to investigate, what he finds will soon have staggering repercussions across the globe: an infected man is on his way to join the millions of worshippers in the annual Hajj to Mecca. Now, Henry joins forces with a Saudi prince and doctor in an attempt to quarantine the entire host of pilgrims in the holy city....

Ten years ago as an undergrad, Joan Mason escaped an arsonist’s fire. Shaken, she fled the small collegiate Montana town, leaving behind friends and not looking back. Now a Philadelphia homicide detective, Joan’s trying to put her traumas to rest. It’s not easy. Elijah Weston, the classmate who torched her house, is out of prison and returning to Missoula. Gut instinct tells Joan he’ll strike again. To stop him, she must return to the past as well. To face not only the man she fears but Detective Gideon Bailey, too. The man she loved and left behind.

Dr. Morton Handler practiced a strange brand of psychiatry. Among his specialties were fraud, extortion, and sexual manipulation. Handler paid for his sins when he was brutally murdered in his luxurious Pacific Palisades apartment. The police have no leads, but they do have one possible witness: seven-year-old Melody Quinn.

Dr. Annabelle Schwartzman has finally found a place to belong. As the medical examiner for the San Francisco Police Department, working alongside homicide detective Hal Harris, she uncovers the tales the dead can't tell about their final moments. It is a job that gives her purpose—and a safe haven from her former life at the hands of an abusive husband. Although it's been seven years since she escaped that ordeal, she still checks over her shoulder to make sure no one is behind her.

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.

In a Tennessee prison, Efrem Judah Goode draws haunting portraits of women he claims he has killed. Around the country, desperate families of the missing seek answers in his eerie drawings. And on darkened back roads and New York City streets, a new killer poses duct-taped bodies at the sites of Goode’s murders. Two serial killers are locked in a twisted rivalry. To stop the brutal slayings, FBI profiler Caitlin Hendrix must unravel the connection between Goode and the Broken Heart Killer.

Newly minted chief resident at Boston Memorial Hospital Noah Rothauser is swamped in his new position, from managing the surgical schedules to dealing with the fallouts from patient deaths. Known for its medical advances, the famed teaching hospital has fitted several ORs as "hybrid operating rooms of the future" - an improvement that seems positive until an anesthesia error during a routine procedure results in the death of an otherwise healthy man.

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.