Colter Shaw is a career "reward-seeker", making his living traveling the country and locating missing persons, collecting reward money in return. So it is not unusual when a wealthy entrepreneur hires him to track down his wife, an enigmatic artist who vanished one month before. As Shaw begins to investigate, he suspects that she was fleeing a bad marriage, and he follows her trail to an artists' retreat in Indiana. The case takes one surprising turn after another, and soon, Shaw begins to wonder if this mysterious woman is more of a captor than a captive.

Lincoln Rhyme was once a brilliant criminologist, a genius in the field of forensics - until an accident left him physically and emotionally shattered. But now a diabolical killer is challenging Rhyme to a terrifying and ingenious duel of wits. With police detective Amelia Sachs by his side, Rhyme must follow a labyrinth of clues that reaches back to a dark chapter in New York City’s past - and reach further into the darkness of the mind of a madman who won’t stop until he has stripped life down to the bone.

When the FBI comes to Lincoln Rhyme with the news that a mysterious assassin is targeting him, the detective is not particularly concerned. With his long career putting away criminals, he is accustomed to threats on his life, and has designed his Upper West Side townhome to be secure against nearly any threat. But when the assassin gets too close for comfort, Rhyme determines to find out why this person is after him. He must put himself inside the mind of a killer in order to save his own life, and possibly the lives of those he loves most.

Evan Smoak is a man with skills, resources, and a personal mission to help those with nowhere else to turn. He’s also a man with a dangerous past. Chosen as a child, he was raised and trained as an Orphan, an off-the-books black box program designed to create the perfect deniable intelligence asset: An assassin. Evan was Orphan X - until he broke with the program and used everything he learned to disappear. But now someone is on his tail.

Just days before a massive exhibition opens at the popular New York Museum of Natural History, visitors are being savagely murdered in the museum's dark hallways and secret rooms. Autopsies indicate that the killer cannot be human.... But the museum's directors plan to go ahead with a big bash to celebrate the new exhibition, in spite of the murders.