A serial killer is on the loose in Richmond. Three women have died, brutalized and strangled in bizarre murders in their own bedrooms. What do the women have in common? Nothing, it seems. Neither physical type nor occupation. And they live in different neighborhoods. The killer apparently strikes at random. The only consistency is that he commits each of his crimes early on Saturday morning.

Someone is stalking Beryl Madison. Someone who spies on her and makes threatening, obscene phone calls to the reclusive author. Terrified, Beryl flees to Key West. But eventually she must return to her Richmond home. The very night she arrives, Beryl inexplicably invites her killer in.

Fred Cheyney and Deborah Harvey left Richmond, Virginia, for the North Carolina coast but never arrived. Their Jeep is found at a highway rest area, the keys still in the ignition, belongings undisturbed.

Kay Scarpetta suspects that both Deborah and Fred are already dead, the latest victims in a string of mysterious killings that have occurred over the past two years. Four young couples have perished in similar circumstances, all within a fifty-mile radius of Williamsburg. Months after they were reported missing, their decomposed bodies were found without shoes and socks, deep in virtually impenetrable woods. Bones and fragments of clothing--and a jack of hearts--are all that remain.

At 11:05 P.M., convicted murderer Ronnie Joe Waddell is pronounced dead in the Commonwealth of Virginia's electric chair.

In the morgue, Dr. Kay Scarpetta has been waiting for Waddell's body. It's a strange feeling, preparing for an autopsy before the subject is dead. But Scarpetta has been here before. As Virginia's chief medical examiner, she knows the tension of watching the clock as the execution hour draws near.

Waddell's death isn't the only newsworthy event on this cold December night. Three hours after thirteen-year-old Eddie Heath goes out to a convenience store to buy a can of soup, his nude, grotesquely wounded body is found propped against a dumpster.

The two events--Waddell's execution and the attack on Eddie--seem unrelated until Scarpetta and Richmond police lieutenant Pete Marino remember that Waddell arranged his victim in a strikingly similar position to Eddie's. And then there's a new murder, the most puzzling of all.

Little Emily Steiner is dead. She left a North Carolina church meeting late one October afternoon and strolled along a lakeside path toward her house two miles away. Who met her on the path? Who followed her home, kidnapped her from her bedroom, and left her body by the lake days later?

From Potter’s Field      4.5 hours      abridged      Blair Brown

Christmas Eve in Central Park--Temple Brooks Gault stands over his latest victim, washing his bloody hands in the snow. Pleased with his new kill, he lifts the heavy steel door of an emergency exit and disappears into the fetid tunnels of the New York subway system.

In Richmond, Dr. Kay Scarpetta is in the midst of a late-night autopsy at the morgue when the call comes: Gault, the sadistic psychopath who has eluded capture for years, has struck again. For Scarpetta, her worst nightmare returns. She and longtime FBI and police colleagues Benton Wesley and Captain Pete Marino fly to the eerie early-morning scene, where they immediately recognize Gault's grizzly handiwork. But no one seems to know his bald female victim, whose naked body has been propped up against a frozen fountain. It makes no sense that she apparently disrobed in the bitter cold without a struggle and walked barefoot over snow to her death.

New Year's Eve. The final murder scene of Virginia's bloodiest year since the Civil War takes Scarpetta thirty feet below the Elizabeth River's icy surface. Ted Eddings, a scuba diver and an investigative reporter who was a favorite at the Medical Examiner's Office, is dead. Was Eddings probing the frigid depths of the inactive shipyard for a story, or simply diving for sunken trinkets? And why did Scarpetta receive a phone call from someone reporting the death before the police were notified?

Dr. Kay Scarpetta is newly returned from Dublin, where she was called in to examine the remains of a murder victim whose limbs and head were expertly severed -- the signature of a cunning serial killer on the loose again after an eight-year sabbatical -- when the same killer apparently strikes again, this time much closer to home. The remains of a woman are found in a Virginia landfill, her body dismembered in the same expert way as in the Dublin case. After Scarpetta investigates the murder scene, the killer boldly contacts her through the Internet, inviting her to download photos of the murder victim and signing off with a chilling screen name: deadoc.

Dr. Kay Scarpetta is getting ready for a romantic holiday with Benton Wesley at Hilton Head when she receives a cryptic and foreboding letter: "Hey DOC, Tick Tock, Sawed bone and fire," it begins. The taunting note is from Carrie Grethen, the psychotic killer Kay helped send to a psychiatric facility for going on a murder spree with Temple Gault in THE BODY FARM.

A cargo ship arriving at Richmond's Deep Water Terminal from Belgium is discovered to be transporting a locked, sealed container holding the decomposed remains of a stowaway.

The autopsy performed by Dr. Kay Scarpetta initially reveals neither a cause of death nor an identification. But the victim's personal effects and an odd tattoo take Scarpetta on a hunt for information that leads to Interpol's headquarters in Lyon, France, where she receives critical instructions: Go to the Paris morgue to receive forbidden, secret evidence and then return to Virginia to carry out a mission. It is a mission that could ruin her career.

The Last Precinct      17.5 hours      unabridged      Kate Reading

We enter The Last Precinct through the reverberating aftershocks of the previous Scarpetta novel, Black Notice, finding Virginia's Chief Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta an object of suspicion -- and criminal investigation. A nightmare perpetuated on Scarpetta's doorstep never seems to end as she discovers that the so-called Werewolf murders may have extended to New York City and into the darkest corners of her past. When a formidable prosecutor, a female assistant district attorney from New York, is brought into the case, Scarpetta must struggle to make what she knows to be the truth prevail against mounting and unnerving evidence to the contrary. Tested in every way, she turns inward to ask, Where do you go when there is nowhere left? The answer is The Last Precinct.

Against advice from her niece Lucy, Kay Scarpetta answers a request to return to the Richmond medical examiner's office, the same office from which she was fired, to help with the sensitive case of a dead teen. When she and Pete Marino arrive, they find the new medical examiner to be a vituperative, uncooperative martinet and the office that Kay ran so efficiently in chaos. Two murders, oddly linked, demand their attention. In the meantime, Lucy, still unsettled despite her success with the Last Precinct investigative agency, is having personal problems (there's been an attack on her housemate), which strangely enough find her treading the same path as her aunt Kay.

Book of the Dead      12.5 hours       unabridged      Kate Reading   **CD**

In mortuary parlance, the "book of the dead" is the morgue ledger; for most of us, nothing more than a grim accounting of the recently deceased. For forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta, though, these morbid sign-out sheets are questions waiting to be answered. As she sets up her new South Carolina private practice, she realizes that these questions seem to be piling up at any alarming rate, leading her to suspect that a serial killer or killers are on the loose.

Scarpetta      15 hours      unabridged       Kate Reading      **CD**

Leaving behind her private forensic pathology practice in Charleston, South Carolina, Kay Scarpetta accepts an assignment in New York City, where the NYPD has asked her to examine an injured man on Bellevue Hospital?s psychiatric prison ward. The handcuffed and chained patient, Oscar Bane, has specifically asked for her, and when she literally has her gloved hands on him, he begins to talk?and the story he has to tell turns out to be one of the most bizarre she has ever heard.

The Scarpetta Factor      16 hours      unabridged      Kate Reading      **CD**

Charlotte is a city of ambition and pride, a city long ago dubbed "the hornet's nest of America." The whirling dervish of a hornet is the dominating symbol on the badge of the police department that protects the city. Like the violence that swirls around Charlotte during a long, hot summer, the hornet traces a dark, angry path, touching down unexpectedly, bringing stings of surprise wherever it lands.

With Charlotte as the simmering background, we are propelled into the core of the force through the lives of a dynamic trio: Andy Brazil, an ambitious young reporter for The Charlotte Observer and an eager -- sometimes too eager -- volunteer cop; Police Chief Judy Hammer, the professionally strong yet personally troubled guardian of Charlotte's law and order; and her deputy chief, Virginia West, a genuine head-turner who is married to her job.

A sequence of serial killings of out-of-towners, men who are pulled from their rental cars, sexually mutilated, marked with orange spray paint and shot, creates tension in Charlotte.

Judy Hammer and Andy Brazil are back in this black comedy reminiscent of Carl Hiaasen's wacky works. Patricia Cornwell presents us with a nearly blind governor who suffers from a "submarine" dysfunction, an island full of watermen, who speak an archaic dialect, and Dr. Faux, an incompetent dentist. Add Popeye, Hammer's kidnapped pooch, a seeing-eye mini-horse that doesn't understand commands, plus a group of murderous road pirates--and you have only a few of the elements which make this a major departure from her usual fare. Michelle Hall's voice is as sweetly melodic as a kindergarten teacher's. Unfortunately, this "prettiness" fails to convey the dark ironies of the novel's subtext. However disappointing the performance, Cornwell has managed to create a memorable assortment of oddballs.

In SOUTHERN CROSS, readers are taken even closer to the sometimes zany (but always threatening) experiences of big-city police, in a story of corruption, scandal, and robberies that escalate to murder.

This time, the setting is Richmond, Virginia, where former Charlotte police chief Judy Hammer has been brought, by an NIJ grant, to clean up the police force. Reeling from the recent death of her husband, and resented by the Richmond police force, city manager, and mayor, Hammer is joined by her deputy chief, Virginia West, and rookie Andy Brazil on the most difficult assignment of her career.

In the face of overwhelming public scrutiny, the trio must find the link between the desecration of Confederate president Jefferson Davis's statue and the brutal murder of an elderly woman.