Forensic Mystery Fiction

In the quiet of twilight, on an early autumn day, 26-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.

At a party for a controversial Los Angeles sex therapist, Alex encounters a face from his own past: Sharon Ransom, an exquisite, alluring lover who left him abruptly more than a decade earlier. Sharon now hints that she desperately needs help, but Alex evades her. The next day she is dead, an apparent suicide. Driven by guilt and sadness, Alex plunges into the maze of Sharon's life - a journey that will take him through the pleasure palaces of California's ultra-rich, into the dark closets of a family's disturbing past.

Morton Farrier’s life has been turned upside down by the recent addition to his household. Despite his perpetual exhaustion, he is determined to crack his latest genealogical investigation: the mystery of one Grace Emmerson, a militant suffragette. Salso happens to be his wife’s great-grandmother. Using a range of genealogical skills and resources, Morton sets out to discover Grace’s secret past.

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.

A raging wildfire. A massive blackout. A wealthy man shot to death in his palatial hilltop home. For Clay Edison, it’s all in a day’s work. As a deputy coroner, caring for the dead, he speaks for those who cannot speak for themselves. He prides himself on an unflinching commitment to the truth. Even when it gets him into trouble. Then, while working the murder scene, Clay is horrified to discover a link to his brother, Luke. Horrified. But not surprised. Luke is fresh out of prison and struggling to stay on the straight and narrow. And now he’s gone AWOL.

He's the psychiatrist that the cops call when the case gets too weird. He specializes in unexplained mysteries of the mind. When the clues stop making sense and children's lives are at risk, he's the outside expert the Baltimore City Police have on speed dial. Gordon isn't afraid to dive headfirst into the paranormal world of the human brain, but sometimes, he needs a little help to pull himself back out again.

The only three females in a group of new residents, the women quickly become roommates and friends, face long hours, a frenetic work pace, and unwanted advances from male colleagues. One becomes involved in unsavory underworld activities, another employs questionable medical skills that are overlooked by the male administrators who value her other services, and another tries to forget a lost love.

After multiple women go missing, Agent Melina Shepard of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation makes the impulsive decision to go undercover as a prostitute. While working the street, she narrowly avoids becoming a serial killer’s latest victim; as much as it pains her to admit, she needs backup. Enter lone wolf FBI agent Jerrod Ramsey. Stonewalled by a lack of leads, he and Melina investigate a scene where a little girl has been found abandoned in a crashed vehicle.

When a beautiful, red haired nurse’s body is found mutilated in her house in Lawley the morning after a date with Detective Constable Ryan Downey, all eyes turn to him. With a very specific modus operandi, Detective Sergeant Jenna Morgan and her team know exactly who the offender is; the trouble is he’s currently serving a life stretch in HMP Long Lartin. It soon becomes evident to DS Morgan and her team that there may be a copycat killer on the loose.

What the world dreads most happened, and now Graham's group has found a way to fight back, but is it too late? And are their methods going too far in the name of humanity? Hear the conclusion of the best-selling series Graham's Resolution, a top 100 best seller in dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction novels.

In the lockdown ward of a psychiatric hospital, Dr. Nadine Lavoie is in her element. She has the tools to help people, and she has the desire: Healing broken families is what she lives for. But Nadine doesn’t want to look too closely at her own past because there are whole chunks of her life that are black holes. It takes all her willpower to tamp down her recurrent claustrophobia, and her daughter, Lisa, is a runaway who has been on the streets for seven years. When a distraught woman, Heather Simeon, is brought into the Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit after a suicide attempt, Nadine gently coaxes her story out of her - and learns of some troubling parallels to her own life.

They called it "minor surgery", but Nancy Greenly, Sean Berman, and a dozen others - all admitted to Boston Memorial Hospital for routine procedures - were victims of the same inexplicable, hideous tragedy on the operating table. They never woke up...

Tanya Bigelow was a solemn little girl when Dr. Alex Delaware successfully treated her obsessive-compulsive symptoms. Now, at 19, Patty Bigelow, Tanya's aunt and adoptive mother, has made a deathbed confession of murder and urged the young woman to seek Delaware's help.

She's young. She's beautiful. And her corpse, laid out in the office of Boston medical examiner Cat Novak, betrays no secrets - except for a notebook clutched in one stiff hand, seven numbers scrawled inside. When a second victim is discovered, Cat begins to fear that a serial killer is stalking the city streets: a shadowy madman without mercy or apparent motive. The police are sceptical. The mayor won't listen. And Cat's chief suspect is one of the city's most prominent citizens.

It’s never easy working fire scenes, Tempe thinks. Called to Washington, DC to analyze the victims of a building set ablaze amid mysterious circumstances, she sees all her misgivings justified. The building site is in Foggy Bottom, a neighborhood with a colorful past and present, and the property’s ownership becomes even more suspicious when Tempe delves into its past. The pieces start falling into place strangely and quickly, and, sensing a good story, Tempe teams with a new ally, telejournalist Ivy Doyle.

There are 206 bones in the human body. Forensic anthropologists know them intimately, can read in them stories of brief or long lives and use them to reconstruct every kind of violent end. 206 Bones opens with Tempe regaining consciousness and discovering that she is in some kind of very small, very dark, very cold enclosed space. She is bound, hands to feet. Who wants Tempe dead, or at least out of the way, and why? Tempe begins slowly to reconstruct...

Hambledon, Pennsylvania, is still reeling from the sensational murder trial that shattered the peace of the bucolic hamlet less than a year ago. Dr. Jonathan Ferrier was accused of killing his beautiful young wife after she died following a botched abortion. The scion of a powerful old eastern family, Jonathan hired the best attorneys money could buy. When he was acquitted, many believed he had bought his freedom. Now, he has returned home to sell his practice and move on. But haunted by his wife's death, Jonathan still strives to heal the judgmental people of his divided town.

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.

The inspiration for the hit Fox series Bones, Kathy Reichs explores another high-stakes crime from today's headlines, in a case that lands forensic anthropologist Tempe Brennan in the middle of a gruesome international scheme.

Newly minted chief resident at Boston Memorial Hospital Noah Rothauser is swamped in his new position, from managing the surgical schedules to dealing with the fallouts from patient deaths. Known for its medical advances, the famed teaching hospital has fitted several ORs as "hybrid operating rooms of the future" - an improvement that seems positive until an anesthesia error during a routine procedure results in the death of an otherwise healthy man.