Forensic Mystery Thriller

It all begins with a painting called Guilt. Eve Duncan’s daughter, Jane, has no idea why she painted the portrait of the chilling face that now hangs in a Paris gallery. But the members of a cult that dates back to the time of Christ know both the face and the significance behind it. They believe that Jane must die – when the moment is right, and not an instant before she leads them to an ancient treasure whose value and power are beyond price.

A top nuclear scientist goes mad and takes an innocent family hostage at gunpoint, killing one and causing a massive standoff. A plume of radiation above New York City leads to a warehouse where, it seems, a powerful nuclear bomb was assembled just hours before. Sifting through the evidence, authorities determine that the unthinkable is about to happen: in ten days, a major American city will be vaporized by a terrorist attack.

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.

Dr. Jacey Flanigan has worked tirelessly to achieve her dream of becoming a pediatric cardiologist. But when she moves to Manhattan to begin her career at a prestigious children's hospital, she discovers that the medical profession may not be what she expected. An encounter with an arrogant heart surgeon on her first day sets the tone for what's to come - a world of enigmatic physician behavior and questionable cardiac surgical practices cloaked in secrecy.

This set contains books seven to nine in the gripping, fast-paced crime fiction series featuring DCI Whitney Walker and forensic psychologist Dr. Georgina Cavendish: Ritual Demise, Mortal Remains, and Silent Graves.

Just as patients are about to be released with a clean bill of health, their conditions take a devastating turn for the worse. Accompanied by the newest member of the Women's Murder Club, Yuki Castellano, Lieutenant Lindsay Boxer probes deeper into the incidents. Could these cases just be appalling coincidences? Or is a maniac playing God with people's lives? When someone close to the Women's Murder Club begins to exhibit the same frightening symptoms, Lindsay fears no one is safe.

LAPD Lieutenant Milo Sturgis has solved a lot of murder cases. On many of them - the ones he calls "different" - he taps the brain of brilliant psychologist Dr. Alex Delaware. But neither Alex nor Milo are prepared for what they find on an early morning call to a deserted mansion in Bel Air. This one’s beyond different. This is predation, premeditation, and cruelty on a whole new level. Four people have been slaughtered and left displayed bizarrely and horrifically in a stretch limousine. Confounding the investigation, none of the victims seems to have any connection to any other.

Deep in the steaming jungles of Paraguay, Aimee Weir is in trouble. The petrobiologist has found what she was looking for - a unique microorganism in a natural gas deposit - but it proves to be more destructive than anyone could have imagined. A contagion is striking down all in its wake. The camp is quarantined, but workers start to vanish in the night. Is it fear of contamination - or has something far more lethal come to the surface? Something that has been trapped beneath the miles of stone, waiting... for us.

In near-future Baltimore, scientific breakthroughs in genetic engineering promise to cure the incurable. But these new technologies are not without a dark side. Powerful criminal organizations thrive on peddling illicit genetic wares, waging an underground war unlike any the city has ever seen.

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.

For untold years, the perfectly preserved mummy had lain forgotten in the dusty basement of Boston’s Crispin Museum. Now its sudden rediscovery by museum staff is both a major coup and an attention-grabbing mystery. Dubbed “Madam X,” the mummy–to all appearances, an ancient Egyptian artifact–seems a ghoulish godsend for the financially struggling institution. But medical examiner Maura Isles soon discovers a macabre message hidden within the corpse–horrifying proof that this “centuries-old” relic is instead a modern-day murder victim.

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.

He's the psychiatrist that the cops call when the case gets too weird. He specializes in unexplained mysteries of the mind. When the clues stop making sense and children's lives are at risk, he's the outside expert the Baltimore City Police have on speed dial. Gordon isn't afraid to dive headfirst into the paranormal world of the human brain, but sometimes, he needs a little help to pull himself back out again.

Little Emily Steiner left a church meeting late one afternoon and strolled toward home along a lakeside path; a week later, her nude body was discovered, bound in blaze-orange duct tape. Called by the North Carolina authorities, forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta recognizes similarities to the gruesome work of a serial killer who has long eluded the FBI. But as she tries to make sense of the evidence, she is left with questions that lead her to the Body Farm, a little known research facility in Tennessee where, with the help of some grisly experiments, she might discover the answer.

Ten years ago in California, Daniel Pell, a self-styled Charles Manson, was sentenced to life in prison for murdering an entire family: husband, wife, and two children, plus one of his young male followers. He is brought to Salinas, California, to interview with Kathryn Dance after he is implicated in yet another killing. Things go terribly wrong during an interview break, and Pell escapes, intent on killing again.

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.

In a small grim room, the body of a woman is discovered, panic and pain etched in her face. The scene matches in every detail a series of murders two years ago-murders that ended when irrefutable forensic evidence secured the conviction of a deeply disturbed young man named Derek Tyler. But there's no way Tyler could have killed the latest victim. He's been locked up in a mental institution since his trial, barely speaking a word. So is there a copycat?

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.

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...

When an Orthodox Jew is found shot to death in Montreal, Temperance Brennan is called in to examine the body and to figure out the puzzling damage to the corpse. Unexpectedly, a stranger slips her a photograph of a skeleton and assures her the picture is the key to the victim's death. Before she knows it, Tempe is involved in an international mystery as old as Jesus, a mystery that could rewrite 2000 years of religious history. that could rewrite 2000 years of religious history. Tempe learns that the stranger's picture shows bones uncovered during an archeological dig.