Forensic Crime Mystery

Someone...or something...is stalking the citizens of Miami. First, the chief of the triage morgue at Dade County Hospital is strangled; the skulls of two homeless men are crushed under a highway overpass, followed by drug dealers, frat boys, and workers at a local diner brutally bludgeoned. Detectives Issy Ruiz and Andy Molinaro can find no motive, no clues, and no links among the victims, just a description of four muscular young men with fixed eyes and stiff gaits as though animated by some otherworldly force.

In the quiet of twilight, on an early autumn day, 26-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, the Cambridge Forensic Center's director and chief, decides at the scene that this is no accidental act of God. Her investigation becomes complicated when she begins receiving a flurry of bizarre poems from an anonymous cyberbully who calls himself Tailend Charlie.

Dr. Caleb Maddox is a San Francisco toxicologist studying the chemical effects of pain. After a bruising breakup with his girlfriend, he is drinking whiskey at the speakeasy House of Shields when a hauntingly seductive woman appears by his side. Emmeline whispers to Caleb over absinthe, gets his blood on her fingers, and then brushes his ear with her lips as she says good-bye. He must find her. As his search begins, Caleb becomes entangled in a serial murder investigation.

When Claire regains consciousness after a stranger causes her car to crash in a snowstorm, she is frantic to discover that her nine-year-old daughter, Emma, is missing from the back seat. Then Emma is found in the woods nearby, unharmed but cradling a child’s skull. She claims it ‘called’ to her – and she can hear another voice nearby. Meanwhile, forensic scientist Rhona MacLeod is trying to discover the identity of a corpse found badly burnt in a skip. The two cases are linked in ways they could never have imagined.

When a skull is found in Lough Coyne, facial reconstruction expert Dr Carla Steele is drawn into a 14-year-old case – but not all cases are cold, as Carla discovers when she and local Garda DS Jack Maguire find the brutally murdered body of a local woman close to the water's edge. Together with Carla's partner, criminal psychologist Grace Franicosi, Carla and Jack uncover a tragic story with very dangerous and current implications. Since the disappearance of her best friend, Carla has dedicated her career to bringing the dead home, but this time it's the living who are counting on her.

A vehicle crammed with dozens of dead Chinese immigrants is found in Southern Texas. Forensic pathologist Margaret Campbell must put aside her horror and find out why. Detective Li Yan - an even more unwelcome memory for Campbell - has arrived stateside to investigate a link in the case to a lucrative trade in illegal laborers. Li and Campbell will soon find that the crime scene hides another secret: a biological time bomb linking traffickers, politicians, and migrants in Beijing, Washington, and Texas - posing multiple countries one very singular threat.

In a far-flung Tibetan village, prayer flags flap against whitewashed houses and a majestic monastery stretches to heaven. It's Shangri-La - the earthly paradise - until a stranger staggers out of the forest and collapses into a bloody, lifeless mass. He's the first victim of a crippling epidemic, but he's no ordinary man. Olen Grave, an American intelligence officer, heads directly into the hot zone to investigate. Posing as a journalist, he joins a Chinese research team led by a headstrong female virus hunter, Dr. Zhou Weilin.

Be careful what you wish for.... John and Naomi are grieving the death of their four-year-old son from a rare genetic disorder. They desperately want another child, but they realize the odds of their next child contracting the same disease are high. Then they hear about geneticist Dr Leo Dettore. He has methods that can spare them the heartache of ever losing another child to any disease. At his clinic is where their nightmare begins.

Natalie King is back. Her reluctance to live a quiet life has led to severe depression, and now it's time to retreat to the country - a borrowed house on the Great Ocean Road and a low-key research job at a provincial university. But Natalie and trouble have a mutual attraction. Unsurprisingly, Natalie finds herself drawn deep into a local mystery and even deeper into danger....

Number-one New York Times best-selling author Patricia Cornwell delivers the 23rd engrossing thriller in her high-stakes series starring medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta. 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.

In the run up to the biggest NASCAR race week of the year, Dr Temperance Brennan is called to a landfill site backing onto the Charlotte speedway track in North Carolina. Someone has discovered a barrel of hardened asphalt with a human hand poking through the top. With the country's press trained on Charlotte, it is up to Tempe to try to release and identify the body in the barrel.

When a plane crashes high in the mountains of North Carolina, forensic anthropologist Tempe Brennan is called in to identify the victims. A chance discovery concerns her: a severed foot, well away from the main crash site. A deserted house close by is buried so deep in the woods that locals claim to know nothing of its existence. And her examination of the foot throws up more questions than answers. Before she can make any progress Tempe's professional standing is threatened.

Justice is worth the risk The death of a child is always heartbreaking, but what Kenzie Kirsch, assistant to the Medical Examiner, finds on her slab shakes her to the core. Kenzie can't help but feel a surge of anger and sadness as she examines the evidence. As she delves deeper into the case, Kenzie uncovers a tangled web of lies and deceit. But Kenzie is not one to back down from a challenge. She will not rest until the guilty are brought to justice. With each new piece of evidence, Kenzie's resolve grows. The truth must be revealed, no matter the cost to her professional career. If ...

Doctor Pendergrass loved London, but the city had a dark side. Its prosperity attracted criminals from all over the world. Their handiwork - stabbings, beatings, and maimings - filled as many hospital beds as cholera and dysentery. As crime spiralled out of control, a serial killer stalked London looking for his next victim. Pendergrass and his associates at Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital were working grueling days, but no matter how hard they worked the flow of brutalized Londoners through their front doors was endless.

Dr. Kay Scarpetta has left Virgina in quest of peace, but instead finds herself drawn into baffling, horrific murders in Florida, where she becomes entangled in an international conspiracy that confronts her with the shock of her life.

It begins with an abduction. The routine of a family shopping trip is shattered when Michelle Spivey is snatched as she leaves the mall with her young daughter. The police search for her, her partner pleads for her release, but it's as if she disappeared into thin air. A month later, on a sleepy Sunday afternoon, medical examiner Sara Linton is at lunch with her boyfriend Will Trent, an agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. But the serenity of the summer's day is broken by the wail of sirens.

It's the second-to-last day of archaeological field school. The students are working on a prehistoric gravesite when a much more recent burial is uncovered. The skeleton is articulated, the bone fresh, and the vertebrae still connected by soft-tissue. It's a case forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan has to take. But her investigations soon have her in too deep - her entire view of humanity is challenged, and the further she probes, the more she seems to be putting herself in danger.

A comatose man is given a fatal dose of insulin in the emergency room, even though he isn't diabetic. An ulcer patient dies of shock after receiving a transfusion of the wrong blood type. A recovering heart patient receives a double dose of medication and suffers a fatal heart attack. Brain surgeon Dr. Tyler Matthews suspects that something is seriously wrong with the hospital's new "Med-InDx" computerized medical record system. But he doesn't suspect that there's something murderously wrong with it.

People come to Hades Archer to dispose of their 'problems' - for a fee. But one night he makes a decision that will change everything. Twenty years later, homicide detective Frank Bennett meets his new partner, the dark and beautiful Eden Archer. But there's something strange about Eden and her brother, Eric. Something he can't quite put his finger on. And as they race to catch a serial killer, Frank starts to wonder if she's as dangerous as the man they hunt.

It's Mardi Gras season in post-Katrina New Orleans. City officials expect record crowds and the biggest boost to the Crescent City economy since the big storm. Alexandra Lee Destephano, legal counsel for Crescent City Medical Center, is anticipating her third Mardi Gras season and her date with Mitch Landry to the biggest Mardi Gras ball in New Orleans. But hold on. Alex is stat-paged to the hospital and learns from her boss and former husband that the wife of the governor of Louisiana has been found unconscious and covered in blood in her hospital room.