Forensic Mystery Fiction

Just as 200,000 fans are pouring into town for Race Week, a body is found in a barrel of asphalt next to the Charlotte Motor Speedway. The next day, a NASCAR crew member comes to Temperance Brennan’s office at the Mecklenburg County Medical Examiner to share a devastating story. Twelve years earlier, Wayne Gamble’s sister, Cindi, then a high school senior and aspiring racer, disappeared along with her boyfriend, Cale Lovette. Lovette kept company with a group of right-wing extremists known as the Patriot Posse.

Colleagues-turned-spouses Dr. Laurie Montgomery and Dr. Jack Stapleton already have their plates full with demanding forensic pathology work and family pressures. The last thing they need is the sudden death of a colleague. Yet when Laurie’s apparently vital and healthy longtime friend Dr. Sue Passero dies mysteriously in the hospital parking garage, an autopsy is required, and it falls uncomfortably under Laurie’s purview as the chief medical examiner. So when Laurie asks Jack to take special care with the case, he can hardly refuse.

A top nuclear scientist goes mad and takes an innocent family hostage at gunpoint, killing one and causing a massive standoff. A plume of radiation above New York City leads to a warehouse where, it seems, a powerful nuclear bomb was assembled just hours before. Sifting through the evidence, authorities determine that the unthinkable is about to happen: in ten days, a major American city will be vaporized by a terrorist attack.

When the phone rings in the middle of the night, child psychologist Alex Delaware does not hesitate. Driving through the dream-lit San Fernando Valley, Alex rushes to Jamey Cadmus, the patient he had failed five years before - and who now calls with a bizarre cry for help. But by the time Alex reaches Canyon Oaks Psychiatric Hospital, Jamey is gone, surfacing a day later in the hands of the police, who believe Jamey is the infamous Lavender Slasher, a psychotic serial killer. Wooed by a high-powered attorney to build a defense, Alex will get a chance to do what he couldn't five years ago.

They call it the Bone Box. A collection of old cases, solved and unsolved, that continue to haunt forensic pathologist Birdy Waterman. None is more disturbing than the first. After two decades, Birdy still remembers the screaming. The blood on the boy's hands. The body of a girl, butchered in the woods. Birdy's testimony helped put her own cousin behind bars. It was a sacrifice for what she thought was right - but now, 20 years later, she wants to reopen the box.

Don Donaldson brings us to the famous French Quarter with our favorite dynamic detective duo in this gripping thriller. New Orleans's chief medical examiner, Andy Broussard, and his assistant, criminal psychologist Kit Franklyn, set off to investigate a series of violent serial murders. Examinations of the victims have led them to discover that each one's throat was ripped out with two tools: a garden fork and something unrecognizable.

Special Agent Macy Crow is a survivor. After a vicious hit-and-run nearly kills her, she gets right back to work, and now she’s gunning for a spot on the FBI’s elite profiling team. As an audition, she offers to investigate the recently discovered bones of Tobi Turner, a high school girl who disappeared fifteen years ago. While investigating with local sheriff Mike Nevada, a former colleague and onetime lover, Macy discovers a link between Tobi’s case and several others that occurred around the same time as her disappearance.

London is in lockdown under martial law. A hospital is being urgently built by the river Thames to contain the thousands of victims of a flu-like epidemic. Construction is brought to a sudden halt when a leather holdall containing the bones of a child is unearthed from the rubble. A psychopath has been unleashed on the city; his mission is to take all measures necessary to prevent the bones from being identified. But why are he and his handlers determined to go to such murderous lengths to hide the origins of the body?

Eleven years ago, the Co-ed Slayer murdered nine female students on the Oregon State University campus. Lacey Campbell barely escaped his attack, but lost her best friend whose remains were never found. As the sole surviving victim, Lacey helped send the sadistic serial killer to prison for life. Now a forensic odontologist examining teeth and bones for the state Medical Examiner, Lacey is devastated when she arrives at a crime scene and identifies the skeletal remains as her college friend’s.

After Dr. Jack Stapleton’s near-death confrontation with a medical serial killer, his wife, NYC Chief Medical Examiner Laurie Montgomery, is carrying the load both at work and at home. When Laurie insists that Dr. Ryan Sullivan—an underperforming senior pathology resident who is spending his required month at the medical examiner's office but who truly detests doing forensic autopsies—assist her on a suicide autopsy in hopes of stimulating his interest in the field, the last thing she expects is to be unwittingly drawn into a major conspiracy that puts her own life in jeopardy.

Officially, Aidan Deveraux is a communications expert for one of the largest financial firms in the world. In his secret life, the former Marine heads the Zermatt Group, a covert team of military and spy agency operatives that searches the data stream for troubling events in an increasingly troubled world. When his artificial intelligence system detects that Lauren Pennington - a college junior studying abroad in Germany - has been kidnapped, Aidan immediately sees the bigger picture.

Jane Rizzoli and Maura Isles - the crime-solving duo who inspired the smash hit TNT series - return to investigate the gruesome staged murder of a horror film producer in this edge-of-your-seat thriller.

In Aurora, Illinois, Aubrey Wheeler is just trying to get by after her semi-criminal ex-husband split, leaving behind his unruly teenage son. Then the lights go out—not just in Aurora but across the globe. A solar storm has knocked out power almost everywhere. Suddenly, all problems are local, very local, and Aubrey must assume the mantle of fierce protector of her suburban neighborhood.

Best-selling author Robin Cook returns with another ripped-from-the- headlines thriller, as New York City medical detective Jack Stapleton investigates the promises - and deadly risks - of alternative medicine and is led deep into the heart of a religious conspiracy...

Boston homicide detective Jane Rizzoli and medical examiner Maura Isles are plagued by what seems like a completely senseless murder. Sofia Suarez, a widow and nurse who was universally liked by all her neighbors, lies bludgeoned to death in her own home. But anything can happen behind closed doors, and Sofia seemed to have plenty of secrets in her last days, making covert phone calls to old contacts and traceless burner phones. When Jane finally makes a connection between Sofia and the victim of a hit-and-run months earlier, the case only grows more blurry.

Just as patients are about to be released with a clean bill of health, their conditions take a devastating turn for the worse. Accompanied by the newest member of the Women's Murder Club, Yuki Castellano, Lieutenant Lindsay Boxer probes deeper into the incidents. Could these cases just be appalling coincidences? Or is a maniac playing God with people's lives? When someone close to the Women's Murder Club begins to exhibit the same frightening symptoms, Lindsay fears no one is safe.

Forensic genealogist Morton Farrier agrees to take on a case to identify the biological mother of three foundlings, abandoned in shop doorways as newborn babies in the 1970s. He has just one thing with which to begin his investigation: the three women’s DNA, one of whom is his half-aunt. With just six days of research time available to him, his investigation uncovers some shocking revelations and troubling links to his own grandfather, and Morton finds that for the first time in his career, he is advising his clients not to read his concluding report.

It’s Dr. Kay Scarpetta’s birthday, and she’s about to head to Miami for a vacation with Benton Wesley, her FBI profiler husband, when she notices seven pennies on a wall behind their Cambridge house. Is this a kids’ game? If so, why are all of the coins dated 1981 and so shiny they could be newly minted? Her cellphone rings, and Detective Pete Marino tells her there’s been a homicide five minutes away.

On a cold, rainy morning, finance journalist Ally Linden arrives soaked to the bone at her Manhattan office, only to find that she's forgotten her keycard. When her boss shows, he's shocked to see her - because, he explains, she hasn't worked there in five years. Ally knows her name, but is having trouble coming up with much beyond that, though after a trip to the psychiatric ER, she begins to piece together important facts: She lives on the Upper West Side; she's now a freelance journalist; she's married to a terrific man named Hugh.

Former star basketball player Clay Edison is busy. He’s solved a decades-old crime and redeemed an innocent man, earning himself a suspension in the process. Things are getting serious with his girlfriend. Plus his brother’s fresh out of prison, bringing with him a whole new set of complications. Then the phone rings in the dead of night. A wild party in a gentrifying East Bay neighborhood. A heated argument that spills into the street. Gunshots. Chaos. For Clay and his fellow coroners, it’s the start of a long night and the first of many to come.