Forensic Mysteries

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.

Before my world came crashing down, I had it all. The successful career I dreamed of. The beautiful red-brick home where I could relax in front of the fire. The handsome, devoted husband whose blue eyes and charming smile always made me feel safe. As I call time of death, my voice is steady. My colleagues stand hushed around me, their eyes on me, confused, concerned.

New York Times best-selling author Iris Johansen delivers a brand new thriller. Every day brings a new challenge for the forensic sculptor Eve Duncan: identify a new victim and help bring a criminal to justice. But Eve, who uses her intuition and modeling clay the same way a sketch artist uses a pencil, is about to meet her greatest challenge yet: a killer who is going to extraordinary lengths to obscure the identity of his victims, leaving them literally faceless and with burned fingerprints.

They called it "minor surgery", but Nancy Greenly, Sean Berman, and a dozen others - all admitted to Boston Memorial Hospital for routine procedures - were victims of the same inexplicable, hideous tragedy on the operating table. They never woke up...

No one speaks the language of suspense more brilliantly than Kathy Reichs, number-one New York Times best-selling author of the acclaimed Temperance Brennan series. In Speaking in Bones, the forensic anthropologist finds herself drawn into a world of dark secrets and dangerous beliefs, where good and evil blur. Professionally, Temperance Brennan knows exactly what to do - test, analyze, identify. Her personal life is another story.

Hospitals are supposed to be places of healing. But in the coronary care unit at one of Copenhagen’s leading medical centers, a nurse fills a syringe with an overdose of heart medication and stealthily enters the room of an older male patient. Six days earlier, a paperboy on his route in central Copenhagen stumbles upon a macabre find: the naked body of a dead woman, lying in a fountain with arms marked with small incisions. Cause of death? Exsanguination - the draining of all the blood in her body.

Read the first book in the Riley Scott detective series, with a twist at the end that you won't see coming, although it was right in front of you the entire time. Atropos will keep you on the edge of your seat and guessing from the opening line until the heart pounding ending. If you’re a fan of Harry Bosch and Alex Cross, make room for the Riley Scott mystery series! If there is such a thing as a routine murder, Detective Riley Scott was hoping that the one he just caught would be exactly that—routine. It turns out to be anything but. He quickly realizes that it is connected to a ...

On the way to hurricane-ravaged Isle of Palms, a barrier island off the South Carolina coast, Tempe receives a call from the Charleston coroner. The storm has tossed ashore a medical waste container. Inside are two decomposed bodies wrapped in plastic and bound with electrical wire. Tempe recognizes many of the details as identical to those of an unsolved case she handled in Quebec 15 years earlier. With a growing sense of foreboding, she travels to Montreal to gather evidence. Meanwhile, health authorities in South Carolina become alarmed as a human flesh-eating contagion spreads.

Eisenmenger has reluctantly taken a job as a locum in the pathology department of St Christopher's Hospital - his partner Helena is pregnant and they must prepare financially for the baby's arrival. John doesn't relish the prospect of being back on the treadmill, working within the NHS again, but when he is unwilling to accept his boss' "death from natural causes" diagnosis after autopsies on various bodies, his professional suspicions are piqued.

It's not the dead that seem strange to Quirke. It's the living. One night, after a few drinks at an office party, Quirke shuffles down into the morgue where he works and finds his brother-in-law, Malachy, altering a file he has no business even reading. Odd enough in itself to find Malachy there, but the next morning, when the haze has lifted, it looks an awful lot like his brother-in-law, the esteemed doctor, was in fact tampering with a corpse—and concealing the cause of death.

Nick Heller is at the top of his game when he receives some devastating news: His old army buddy, Sean, has died of an overdose. Sean, who once saved Nick’s life, got addicted to opioids after returning home wounded from war. Then, at Sean’s funeral, a stranger approaches Nick with a job, and maybe also a way for Nick to hold someone accountable. The woman is the daughter of a pharmaceutical kingpin worth billions. Now, she wants to become a whistleblower, exposing her father and his company for burying evidence.

A grotesquely burned corpse found in a city park is a troubling mystery for Beijing detective Li Yan. Yan, devoted to his career as a means of restoring the respect his family lost during the Cultural Revolution, needs outside help if he is to break the case. The unidentified cadaver in turn provides a welcome distraction for forensic pathologist Margaret Campbell. Campbell, married to her work and having left America and her broken past behind, throws herself into the investigation and before long uncovers a bizarre anomaly.

After fleeing Los Angeles during the last, desperate throes of the DRYP pandemic, medical resident Susan Barry and critically injured oil company executive Alan Wheeler know their toehold on survival in rural Liberty Valley won't last. They need food, fuel, and help. At first, they reach out to other survivors by radio, but when a mysterious code starts, the other survival colonies disappear from the air one by one.

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.

Trying to find some normalcy during the COVID-19 pandemic, Brian Murphy and his family are on a summer excursion in Cape Cod when his wife, Emma, comes down with concerning flu-like symptoms. But their leisurely return home to New York City quickly becomes a race to the local hospital as she suddenly begins seizing in the car. At the ICU, she is diagnosed with eastern equine encephalitis, a rare and highly lethal mosquito-borne viral disease seemingly caught during one of their evening cookouts.

From the depths of the Indian Ocean, a horrific plague has arisen to devastate humankind - a disease that's unknown, unstoppable, and deadly. But it is merely a harbinger of the doom that is to follow. Aboard a cruise liner transformed into a makeshift hospital, Dr. Lisa Cummings and Monk Kokkalis, operatives of SIGMA Force, search for answers to the bizarre affliction. But there are others with far less altruistic intentions.

The voice belongs to a woman, but Dr. Alex Delaware remembers a little girl. It is 11 years since seven-year-old Melissa Dickinson dialed a hospital help line for comfort - and found it in therapy with Alex Delaware. Now the lovely young heiress is desperately calling for the psychologist's help once more. Only this time it looks like Melissa's deepest childhood nightmare is really coming true....

In the beginning there were five identical murders - bodies eviscerated and organs scattered playfully around. Beverly Wharton pinned the crime on Melkior Pendred, a highly skilled and autistic mortuary assistant.

The master of medical suspense brings us another novel of controversy, biology, and human greed. Internist Matt Rutledge has spent the last five years trying to find links between the deaths of his wife and his father. He suspects the Belinda Coke and Coal Company has released toxic chemicals into the environment that have caused the "Belinda Syndrome," a miasma of symptoms that include violent and deadly paranoia in some, Ebola-like hemorrhaging in others. But he lacks proof.

Boston homicide detective Jane Rizzoli and medical examiner Maura Isles are plagued by what seems like a completely senseless murder. Sofia Suarez, a widow and nurse who was universally liked by all her neighbors, lies bludgeoned to death in her own home. But anything can happen behind closed doors, and Sofia seemed to have plenty of secrets in her last days, making covert phone calls to old contacts and traceless burner phones. When Jane finally makes a connection between Sofia and the victim of a hit-and-run months earlier, the case only grows more blurry.