FICTION · DETECTIVE AND MYSTERY
Michael M. Baden
Also known as: Michael M.D. Baden, Michael Baden
American physician and forensic pathologist
" I AM DEAD.
— from Grave Secrets
Most acclaimed
Dead reckoning
Is death written in a fortune-tellers cards? Three friends, Althea Lewis, Phoebe Denton and Cressida Cruse have been friends since schooldays. Cressida had been to art college and emerged a promising young artist who soon started to make a name for herself. Fiercely independent, she never married. Althea married, had a son, divorced, and was now married to the successful, but arrogant, businessman Geoffrey Lewis. And now that the initial ardour had cooled, and she took stock of her life coming up to forty, she wasn't sure she was still in love with him. Phoebe became an actress, and had been seriously involved with her married lover. Her calling meant she only kept in touch sporadically with her once-inseparable friends. But this time when they met up and Phoebe heard that the time for Geoffrey's annual charity Garden Party was imminent, she volunteered a fortune-telling acquaintance of hers. And Madame Tokoly was sufficiently accurate to unnerve Geoffrey totally. And then she draws the Death Card... From that moment, things go from bad to worse, and Geoffrey's behaviour is under scrutiny. If the past comes to life, then death, more than one, is a rude awakening....
Grave Secrets
It was a summer morning in 1982 when soldiers ravaged the village of Chupan Ya, raping and killing women and children. Twenty-three victims are said to lie in the well where, twenty years later, Dr. Temperance Brennan and a team from the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation now dig. No records were kept. To their families, the dead are "the disappeared."Forensic anthropologist for the medical examiners in North Carolina and Montreal, Tempe is in Guatemala for a month's service to help some families identify and bury their dead. She digs in a cold, damp pit where she finds a hair clip, a fragment of cloth, a tiny sneaker. Her trowel touches something hard: the hip of a child no more than two years old. It's heartbreaking work. Something savage happened here twenty years ago. The violence continues today. The team is packing up for the day when an urgent satellite call comes in. Two colleagues are under attack. Shots ring out, and Tempe listens in horror to a woman's screams. Then there is silence. Dead silence. With this new violence, everything changes, both for the team and for Tempe, who's asked by the Guatemalan police for her expertise on another case. Four privileged young women have vanished from Guatemala City in recent months. One is the Canadian ambassador's daughter. Some remains have turned up in a septic tank, and Tempe unfortunately knows septic tanks. Teaming with Special Crimes Investigator Bartolome Galiano, and with Montreal detective Andrew Ryan, who may have more than just professional reasons to join her on the case, Tempe soon finds herself in a dangerous web that stretches far beyond Guatemala's borders. The stakes are huge. As power, money, greed, and science converge, Tempe must make life-altering choices. From cutting-edge science in the lab, where Tempe studies fetal bones and cat hair DNA, to a chilling en-counter in a lonely morgue, "Grave Secrets" is powerful, page-turning entertainment from a crime fiction superstar who combines riveting authenticity with witty, elegant prose.
Skeleton justice
Forensic expert Dr. Michael Baden of the HBO series Autopsy and trial attorney and legal commentator Linda Kenney Baden bring us a chilling new thriller featuring their crack crime-fighting duo: Dr. Jake Rosen, world-famous pathologist, deputy chief medical examiner, and devoted scientist; and top litigator Manny Manfreda, who is as lovely (and accessorized) as she is gutsy.The case begins with New York City on high alert for a most bizarre serial killer--a strange kind of thief who stalks his victims for the purpose of extracting a vial of blood, earning him the tabloid nickname the Vampire. As the attacks become more and more vicious and escalate to torture and then to murder, Jake and Manny begin to suspect there is a connection between the killer's seemingly random victims. But what is the link between the Vampire and a case that Manny's been working for a kid whose high school prank-gone-wrong has earned him the moniker the Preppy Terrorist and an FBI electronic ankle bracelet? Jake's careful forensic examinations, Manny's courtroom tenaciousness, and an unusual clue suggesting that a high-ranking politician has risen from the grave take the pair from the bowels of the morgue to the world of international intrigue. At the heart of this story is a tragic tale of corruption interlaced with cover-ups, conspiracies, death squads, and dictators who committed crimes that to this day go unpunished.A fast-paced, boldly imagined work from an exuberant new team in suspense.From the Hardcover edition.