After working one of the worst mass killings in U.S. history, Scarpetta returns home to Cambridge, Massachusetts, when she receives an unsettling call. The body of a young woman has been discovered on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's rugby field and physical evidence links the case to a series of uniquely weird homicides in Washington, D.C., where Scarpetta's FBI husband has been deployed to help capture a serial killer dubbed the Capital...

Young lovers are disappearing in Richmond, Virginia, only to be found later as mutilated corpses. Following a macabre trail of evidence that ties the present homicides to a grisly crime in the past, Dr. Kay Scarpetta must track down a murderer before another missing couple become the next victims.

Against the advice of her FBI Agent husband, Chief Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta is on her way to a Georgia Prison for Women where she will be meeting an inmate who is the biological mother of a killer. She hopes to learn more about the death of her deputy chief six months earlier and if his death is connected to a string of present day killings.

Under cover of night in Richmond, Virginia, a human monster strikes, leaving a gruesome trail of stranglings that has paralyzed the city. Medical examiner Kay Scarpetta suspects the worst: a deliberate campaign by a brilliant serial killer whose signature offers precious few clues. With an unerring eye, she calls on the latest advances in forensic research to unmask the madman. But this investigation will test Kay like no other, because it's being...