Forensic Mystery Fiction

Not too long from today, a new, highly contagious virus makes its way across the globe. Most who get sick experience nothing worse than flu, fever, and headaches. But for the unlucky one percent - and nearly five million souls in the United States alone - the disease causes "Lock In": Victims fully awake and aware, but unable to move or respond to stimulus. The disease affects young, old, rich, poor, people of every color and creed. The world changes to meet the challenge.

No one speaks the language of suspense more brilliantly than Kathy Reichs, number-one New York Times best-selling author of the acclaimed Temperance Brennan series. In Speaking in Bones, the forensic anthropologist finds herself drawn into a world of dark secrets and dangerous beliefs, where good and evil blur. Professionally, Temperance Brennan knows exactly what to do - test, analyze, identify. Her personal life is another story.

Chief medical examiner Kay Scarpetta is the reluctant star witness in a sensational murder trial when she receives shocking news. The judge’s sister has been found dead. At first glance, it appears to be a home invasion, but then why was nothing stolen, and why is the garden strewn with dead plants and insects? Although there is no apparent cause of death, Scarpetta recognizes telltale signs of the unthinkable, and she knows the worst is yet to come. The forensic pathologist finds herself pitted against a powerful force that returns her to the past.

World renowned neurosurgeon Jon Ritter is on the verge of a medical breakthrough that will change the world. His groundbreaking surgical treatment, using transplanted non-human stem cells, is set to eradicate the scourge of Alzheimer’s disease and give hope to millions. But when the procedure is slated for testing, it all comes to an abrupt and terrifying halt.

Convicted serial killer Carrie Grethen has escaped from a psychiatric hospital with plans for revenge. Wary and shaken, Scarpetta also has to investigate the death by fire of an unknown woman. The post mortem reveals that the woman was stabbed before the fire was started, and soon Scarpetta and her colleagues are called out to the scene of another fire and another murder.

Devilishly clever, Next blends fact and fiction into a breathless tale of a new world where nothing is what it seems, and a set of new possibilities can open at every turn. Next challenges our sense of reality and notions of morality. Balancing the comic and bizarre with the genuinely frightening and disturbing, Next shatters our assumptions and reveals shocking new choices where we least expect.

Master Sergeant Reed Beckham has led his Delta Force Team, codenamed Ghost, through every kind of hell imaginable and never lost a man. When a top-secret Medical Corps research facility goes dark, Team Ghost is called in to face their deadliest enemy yet - a variant strain of Ebola that turns men into monsters.

After the death of his fiancee due to medical errors, hospital pharmacist Daniel O'Dwyer escapes to Oak Island, North Carolina. The only things on his mind are fresh sea air, fresh seafood, Fat Tire Amber Ale, and the avoidance of any type of healthcare institution. But fate and jellyfish draw him back, and reluctantly, he agrees to go undercover to combat narcotic drug diversion at nearby Boiling Grove Community Hospital.

Richard Parnell is one of the leading minds in gene therapy research, and he expects the job at Dubette, Inc., to be his first step to a Nobel Prize. But when he arrives at the American pharmaceutical giant, he finds himself shut out of the main avenues of research, isolated from the cutting edge in a way he has never been before.

Des effets secondaires insoupçonnés. Poids à perdre: huit foutues livres. Méthodes utilisées pour y parvenir: faire de l’exercice de façon saine? Manger santé? Non.... Suer à grosses gouttes avec un sac poubelle sur le dos, ne rien avaler de la journée et, surtout, vomir. Ç’a toujours été la solution la plus efficace. Mais mon chum Manu commençait à en avoir assez de mon petit manège. Et moi aussi, d’ailleurs.

Someone is stalking the UCLA Medical Center - a depraved madman who is preying upon the staff, particularly those who are young and female. No stranger to the terrible ravages of senseless violence, E.R. Chief Dr. David Spier must keep the emergency room running smoothly and efficiently, even as his terrified co-workers wonder who will be the next victim. But when the monster himself is dragged into the E.R. in handcuffs - hideously burned, suffering, and begging for mercy - the nightmare is far from over. It has only just begun.

The Chinese police have once more been forced to enlist the services of American forensic pathologist Margaret Campbell, this time to investigate a series of four horrific ritual executions in Beijing. Detective Li Yan is determined to discover just how one of the victims in particular, an American diplomat, became caught up in the slaying. And he is arguably even more determined to have nothing to do with Campbell, whom he finds simultaneously too foreign and too... familiar. The personal polarity that once attracted Yan and Campbell again strengthens their professional partnership.

Chief medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta finds herself in a Northern Virginia wilderness examining the remains of two campers wanted by federal law enforcement. The victims have been savaged beyond recognition, and other evidence is terrifying and baffling, including a larger-than-life footprint. After one of the most frightening body retrievals of her career, Scarpetta must discover who would commit murders this savage, and why.

Anthropology Professor Gideon Oliver would prefer to keep his mind on his beautiful new bride, Julie, during their English honeymoon, but one intrusive question will not stop nagging at him: Who would want to steal a 30,000-year-old parieto-occipital calvarial fragment? Yet someone has lifted this chunk of prehistoric human skull from a musty museum in Dorchester. Then, 30 miles away, an archaeology student is murdered, increasing tension and suspicion at a dig that had already seethed with suspicion, rivalry, and mistrust.

Seventeen months after the Parkman case, Dr. Hartford has returned to Chicago to finish her surgical residency. But when she is contacted out of the blue by Solange McClelland, the only survivor of a decade-old triple homicide, Emily is compelled to dig deeper. She doesn’t know the details of the event but remembers it as one of the few cases her deceased father never solved. On her thirtieth birthday, Solange opens a long-forgotten safe-deposit box and is entirely baffled by what she finds.

New Orleans criminal psychologist Kit Franklyn, lately drowning in personal doubts about her life and career, thinks that investigating the corpse she found in the garden of her new home will be the perfect distraction. Together with her boss, chief medical examiner Andy Broussard, she sets out to solve this case that seems plain unsolvable. Though they identify the body as a missing hooker, now dead 27 years, all hope of conviction still seems lost.

After a nationwide manhunt for notorious felon Carl Deere left two women hospitalised in a critical condition, clinical psychiatrist and criminal profiler Doctor Alexander Gregory is left heartbroken. Both are special to him: one is his new friend, Detective Chief Inspector Ava Hope, and the other is the woman he loves, Doctor Naomi Palmer. However, there’s something he doesn’t know…

Piper is a lich-doctor, a physician who works among the dead, determining causes of death for the city guard's investigations. It's a peaceful, if solitary profession . . . until the day when he's called to the river to examine the latest in a series of mysterious bodies, mangled by some unknown force. Galen is a paladin of a dead god, lost to holiness and no longer entirely sane. He has long since given up on any hope of love. But when the two men and a brave gnole constable are drawn into the maze of the mysterious killer, it's Galen's job to protect Piper from the traps that await.

When Matthew Preston was eight, his father was shot and killed in rarefied Pacific Palisades by Ted Nash, a home burglar who happened to be the Prestons' neighbor. Though Nash was sentenced to life in San Quentin, Matthew's lifelong obsession is to somehow get into the prison, gain access to Nash, and exact the ultimate personal revenge. He devises a plan to become a prison doctor to gain access to Nash.

A string of mutilated bodies sees Detective Chief Inspector Whitney Walker back in action. But when she discovers the victims have all been grooming young girls, she fears a vigilante is on the loose. And while she understands the motive, no one is above the law. Once again, she turns to forensic psychologist, Dr Georgina Cavendish, to unravel the cryptic clues. But will they be able to save the next victim from a gruesome death?