#1 New York Times bestselling author Patricia Cornwell returns with the remarkable twenty-fourth thriller in her popular high-stakes series starring medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta.In the quiet of twilight, on an early autumn day, twenty-six-year-old Elisa Vandersteel is killed while riding her bicycle along the Charles River. It appears she was struck by lightning—except the weather is perfectly clear with not a cloud in sight. Dr. Kay Scarpetta, the Cambridge Forensic Center’s director and chief, decides at the scene that this is no accidental Act of God.Her investigation becomes complicated when she begins receiving a flurry of bizarre poems from an anonymous cyberbully who calls himself Tailend Charlie. Though subsequent lab results support Scarpetta’s conclusions, the threatening messages don’t stop. When the tenth poem arrives exactly twenty-four hours after Elisa’s death, Scarpetta begins to suspect the harasser is involved, and sounds the alarm to her investigative partner Pete Marino and her husband, FBI analyst Benton Wesley.She also enlists the help of her niece, Lucy. But to Scarpetta’s surprise, tracking the slippery Tailend Charlie is nearly impossible, even for someone as brilliant as her niece. Also, Lucy can’t explain how this anonymous nemesis could have access to private information. To make matters worse, a venomous media is whipping the public into a frenzy, questioning the seasoned forensics chief’s judgment and "a quack cause of death on a par with spontaneous combustion."
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The #1 New York Times Bestseller, USA Today Book of the Year, now a major motion picture. The debut psychological thriller that will forever change the way you look at other people's lives. “Nothing is more addicting th...
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Narrator: Caitlin Greer Published: 03/07/2017
About the Author
Patricia Cornwell is a Miami born, contemporary crime novelist. Her books usually feature the heroine Dr. Kay Scarpetta, who is a medical examiner. After a way sad childhood, Cornwall graduated from Davidson College with a degree in English. She wrote a biography of a family friend entitled, “A Time for Remembering”, then renamed “Ruth, A Portrait: The Story of Ruth Bell Graham” in 1983. After working in a Virginia medical examiners for six years, she wrote the first installment of her “Scarpetta” series entitled “Postmortem”. Her six year job was valuable in including a lot of forensic science details in her “Scarpetta” series. Her novels are considered to have influenced the creation of the TV series on forensics such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and Cold Case. In the same vein Cornwell made a brief appearance on the Criminal Minds episode “True Genius”, as herself.
