Forensic Mystery Fiction

After an exchange student with bubonic plague turns up in a Reno hospital, a contractor with identical symptoms dies in Los Angeles. The government‘s official stance is that the cases are isolated and the outbreak is under control. But George Mack, a 30-year public health veteran, quickly realizes this is no ordinary plague. The death toll is too high, and the spread pattern make no sense. As Reno’s hospitals fill with victims, Mack begins to believe that there is more to the epidemic than the CDC is letting on - and that he must take drastic steps if he hopes to save his city.

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.

Ben Dafoe, emergency-room doctor and part-time crime-scene consultant, is haunted by addiction. Two years before, a cocaine habit claimed the life of his identical twin, Aaron. Now Ben walks onto the scene of a savage stabbing to learn that the victim, Emily Kenmore, is his former fiancée, another loved one who fell prey to addiction. One the wall in Emily's bedroom is a streak of blood that belongs to the killer. When the DNA from that sample matches Ben's blood, he becomes the prime suspect.

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.

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.

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.

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.

From acclaimed British author Nathan Dylan Goodwin comes this exciting new genealogical crime mystery, featuring the redoubtable forensic genealogist, Morton Farrier. When Morton is called upon by Ray Mercer to investigate the 1911 disappearance of his great aunt, a housemaid working in a large Edwardian country house, he has no idea of the perilous journey into the past that he is about to make. Morton must use his not inconsiderable genealogical skills to solve the mystery of Mary Mercer’s disappearance, in the face of the dangers posed by those others who are determined to end his investigation at any cost.

Cameryn's ex-boyfriend is back....and ready to kill!Cameryn had thought she was in love with him. He was smart, strong, and would do anything for her - even kill. Kyle O'Neil disappeared after his first attempt on Cameryns life at the end of The Angel of Death. Now he is back for his second.

When Owen Galloway, the track star son of a prominent US senator, is found dead of an overdose in his bedroom, LAPD Detective Cari Garcia suspects that he’s just another teenager who hid a drug addiction. In Vancouver, Dr. Julie Rees, an experienced toxicologist, notices a growing number of overdoses among the eating disordered and body builders, and mentions it to her boyfriend, Detective Anson Chen.

Deep in the steaming jungles of Paraguay, Aimee Weir is in trouble. The petrobiologist has found what she was looking for - a unique microorganism in a natural gas deposit - but it proves to be more destructive than anyone could have imagined. A contagion is striking down all in its wake. The camp is quarantined, but workers start to vanish in the night. Is it fear of contamination - or has something far more lethal come to the surface? Something that has been trapped beneath the miles of stone, waiting... for us.

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...

Something odd in the deceased's mouth sets Alexa and the team on a new track—to find Quinn's murderer. As they work to narrow the suspect field, a second homicide—and a stolen cache of weapons from a locked room in the bunker—ramp up the investigation and the risk to Alexa's life. Will she be able to solve this particular riddle before she becomes victim #3?

Psychologist Dr. Alex Delaware confronts a killer who takes as much pleasure in matching wits with the police as in robbing human life. A diplomat's retarded daughter is murdered on a school field trip. The girl's father denies the possibility of a political motive, leaving LAPD detective Milo Sturgis and his longtime friend, Alex Delaware, stymied. When another killing occurs, Alex finds himself ensnared in one of the most menacing cases of his career.

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.

Former naval doctor Peter Crane is summoned to a remote oil platform in the North Atlantic to help diagnose a bizarre medical condition. But when he arrives, Crane learns that the real trouble lies far below on "Deep Storm", a stunningly advanced science-research facility built two miles beneath the surface on the ocean floor. The top-secret structure has been designed for one purpose: to excavate a recently discovered undersea site that may hold the answers to an ancient mystery.

Jeanette Garland, missing Castleford, July 1969. Susan Ridyard, missing Rochdale, March 1972. Claire Kemplay, missing Morley, since yesterday. It’s winter, 1974, Yorkshire, Christmas bombs, Lord Lucan on the run, the Bay City Rollers, and Eddie Dunford’s got the job he wanted – crime correspondent for the Yorkshire Evening Post. He didn’t know it was going to be a season in hell. A dead little girl with a swan’s wings stitched into her back. A gypsy camp in a ring of fire. Corruption everywhere you look.

Determined to help her amnesiac patients recover their lives, Boston psychiatrist Cristina Silva is achieving near-miraculous results by prescribing Recognate, a revolutionary new memory-recovery drug now in trials. She understands her patients’ suffering better than most, because she’s lost her memories, too. Desperate to become herself again, she pops the same experimental drug she prescribes to her patients. And, like them, she remembers a little more each day. Until one of her patients, a successful accountant, jumps from an eight-story window to his death.

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.

Elizabeth is a gifted surgeon - the only female consultant at her hospital. But while operating on a young woman with life-threatening blood poisoning, something goes horribly wrong. In the midst of a new scheme to publicly report surgeons' performance, her colleagues begin to close ranks, and Elizabeth's life is thrown into disarray. Tough and abrasive, Elizabeth has survived and succeeded in this most demanding, palpably sexist field. But can she survive a single mistake?