Patricia Cornwell

It is the week before Christmas. A tanking economy has prompted Dr. Kay Scarpetta – despite her busy schedule and her continuing work as the senior forensic analyst for CNN – to offer her services pro bono to New York City's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. In no time at all, her increased visibility seems to precipitate a string of unexpected and unsettling events. She is asked live on the air about the sensational case of Hannah Starr, who has vanished and is presumed dead. Moments later during the same telecast she receives a startling call-in from a former psychiatrist patient of Benton Wesley's. When she returns after the show to the apartment where she and Benton live, she finds an ominous package – possibly a bomb – waiting for her at the front desk. Soon the apparent threat on Scarpetta's life finds her embroiled in a surreal plot that includes a famous actor accused of an unthinkable sex crime and the disappearance of a beautiful millionaires with whom Lucy seems to have shared a secret past.Scarpetta's CNN producer wants her to launch a TV show called The Scarpetta Factor. Given the bizarre events already in play, she fears that her growing fame will generate the illusion that she has a "special factor," a mythical ability to solve all her cases. She wonders if she will end up like other TV personalities: her own stereotype.The Scarpetta Factor, the seventeenth in the series, finds the familiar cast of characters together again in New York. Marino is working for the NYPD; Benton Wesley uses his forensic psychological expertise at Kirby and Bellevue; and Lucy continues to dazzle with her expertise in forensic computer investigations as she works yet another case with NY prosecutor Jaime Berger.

Over a span of almost 60 years, E. Hoffmann Price, a prolific writer during the great pulp magazine fiction era, befriended many of the great and near-great colleagues of the profession—writers like H. P, Lovecraft, August Derleth, Jack Williamson, Edmond Hamilton, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Henry Kuttner, Seabury Quinn, Otis Adelbert Kline, W. K. Mashburn, Ralph Milne Farley, Robert Spencer Carr, Albert Richard Wetjen, Norbert C. Davis, Harry Olmstead, Milo Ray Phelps— and Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright. Through a vast correspondence, diaries he kept of his many cross-country motor trips, E. Hoffmann Price encapsulates the successes and failures of a score of fascinating lives through a series of engaging biographical essays that also reveal important details about the author's own nomadic life. Historian Richard Bleiler says, "I was absolutely floored by BOOK OF THE DEAD. It is incredible! Price was one of the undisputed masters of the biographical sketch. His works on Smith, Lovecraft and Howard are among the most informative and vital portraits of these people ever done—and now there is a whole book of his portraits of other pulp writers and figures, all vividly portrayed, warts and all." Bleiler continues, "This is one of the most important documents in pulp studies to emerge in recent years, and I thoroughly regret that it was not published 25 years ago when Price was still alive to get honored for it." BOOK OF THE DEAD includes additional essays by and about Price, a bibliography of his fiction, an index, and a photo gallery.

In a novel the Village Voice calls "memorable" and "striking," Alice Hoffman vividly portrays a family shattered by tragedy when eleven-year-old Amanda is diagnosed with AIDS...

From the author of Unnatural Exposure and Cause of Death comes a new Kay Scarpetta novel that pits Virginia's chief medical examiner against an audacious and wily killer who uses fire to mask his crimes. And when Scarpetta learns that her old nemesis, Carrie Grethen, is somehow involved, the investigation gets personal and tragedy strikes closer to home.

A biography of Ruth Bell Graham, wife of evangelist Billy Graham, discussing her childhood in China as the daughter of medical missionaries, her contribution to her husband's work, and her efforts to keep their home and family life intact.

El cadáver de Theodore Andrew Edding ha aparecido bajo el agua, tras una supuesta sesión de inmersión. La forense Kay Scarpetta se encarga del caso y empieza a recibir llamadas telefónicas con identidades falsas, al tiempo que se producen comportamientos sospechosos por parte de sus colegas, intrigantes visitas nocturnas y molestos sabotajes. Ante esta situación, a Scarpetta no le queda más remedio que encerrarse en su laboratorio y no dejar ningún indicio por investigar. In Norfolk, Virginia, a reporter is killed while scuba diving in the naval yard. As she investigates, chief medical examiner Kay Scarpetta uncovers a plot by a fascist militia to take over an atomic power plant.

"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's 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.". "Waddell's execution, the attack on Eddie - the two events 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." "The crime scenes yield few clues: old bloodstains, fragments of feather, and - most baffling - a bloody fingerprint that points Scarpetta to the one suspect who could not possibly have committed this murder.". "And somewhere in Virginia's corridors of power, perhaps even in her own office, lurks an enemy who will destroy Scarpetta unless she can produce the proof that will clear her name. With some help from her seventeen-year-old niece, computer whiz Lucy, as well as from her loyal friend Lieutenant Marino and FBI agent Benton Wesley, Scarpetta musters all her forensic expertise and investigative skills to uncover shocking secrets that will have vast repercussions.". "Cruel and Unusual moves bestselling author Patricia D. Cornwell in dramatic new directions, confirming the extraordinary range and power of this gifted, prizewinning writer."--BOOK JACKET.

Forensic pathologist Dr. Kay Scarpetta investigates the murder of U.S. tennis star Drew Martin, and soon discovers a connection between Martin's death, the death of an unidentified boy in South Carolina, and her old enemy psychiatrist Dr. Marilyn Self.

An unidentified nude female sits propped against a fountain in Central Park. There are no signs of struggle. When Dr. Kay Scarpetta and her colleagues Benton Wesley and Pete Marino arrive on the scene, they instantly recognize the signature of serial killer Temple Brooks Gault. Scarpetta, on assignment with the FBI, visits the New York City morgue on Christmas morning, where she must use her forensic expertise to give a name to the nameless—a difficult task. But as she sorts through conflicting forensic clues, Gault claims his next victim. He has infiltrated the FBI’s top secret artificial-intelligence system developed by Scarpetta’s niece, and sends taunting messages as his butchery continues, moving terrifyingly closer to Scarpetta herself.

A case for Dr Kay Scarpetta and Detective Pete Marino to crack - and a threat to Scarpetta which could change the course of her career.

Originally published: New York : G.P. Putnam's Sons, ©2008

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. As Scarpetta watches, she begins to learn frightening secrets about her niece, whom she has loved and raised like a daughter. That film clip and then others sent soon after raise dangerous legal implications that increasingly isolate Scarpetta and leave her confused, worried, and not knowing where to turn. She doesn't know whom she can tell -- not her FBI husband Benton Wesley or her investigative partner Pete Marino. Not even Lucy. The clips launch these characters on an intensely psychological odyssey that includes the mysterious death of a Hollywood mogul's daughter, aircraft wreckage on the bottom of the sea in the Bermuda Triangle, a grisly gift left in the back of a crime scene truck, and videos from the past that threaten to destroy Scarpetta's entire world and everyone she loves. The diabolical presence behind what unfolds seems obvious -- but strangely, not to the FBI. Certainly that's the message they send when they raid Lucy's estate and begin building a case that could send her to prison for the rest of her life.