Medical Mystery Thriller

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.

When San Francisco–based FDA epidemiologist Dr. Carrie Hediger uncovers a rash of unexplained deaths while investigating the suspiciously convenient death of her best friend, she becomes determined to find answers—even if it leads her to a murderer, and even if confronting authority, using her wiles, and bending the rules to get justice risks her future in the FDA. To unravel the puzzle, Carrie assembles a team: some talented post-doctoral fellows, a quirky pharmacologist, an unctuous chemist, and a skeptical FBI agent that she can’t help her attraction for.

Forensic pathologist Dr. Kay Scarpetta has come almost full circle, returning to Virginia, the state where she launched her storied career, as the chief medical examiner. Finding herself the new girl in town once again after being away for many years, she’s inherited both an overbearing secretary and a legacy of neglect and potential corruption.

Dr. Kate Turner is happy with her new life in Oak Falls in upstate New York. Working as a relief veterinarian at a small house-call practice, she truly enjoys helping her patients. All that changes when client Claire Birnham is found dead, an apparent suicide. A talented artist, Claire had everything to live for: a new job; a Manhattan apartment; her cairn terrier, Toto. As feisty as the Wizard of Oz's Toto, he and Claire were devoted to each other. Kate can't imagine Claire simply abandoning her pet. Was her death murder?

He slips into their homes at night and walks silently into bedrooms where women lie sleeping, unaware of the horrors they soon will endure. The precision of the killer's methods suggests he is a deranged man of medicine, propelling the Boston newspapers and the frightened public to name him "The Surgeon". The cops' only clue rests with another surgeon, the victim of a nearly identical crime. Two years ago, Dr. Catherine Cordell fought back and killed her attacker before he could complete his assault.

When she fell asleep, the world was doomed. When she awoke, it was dead. In the wake of a fever that decimated the earth's population - killing women and children and making childbirth deadly for the mother and infant - the midwife must pick her way through the bones of the world she once knew to find her place in this dangerous new one. Gone are the pillars of civilization. All that remains is power - and the strong who possess it.

Called in to examine what is left of a person thought to have been struck by lightning, Tempe traces an unusual tattoo to its source and is soon embroiled in a much larger case. Young men—tourists—have been disappearing on the islands of Turks and Caicos. Seven years earlier, the first victim was found in a strange location with his left hand hacked off; subsequently, two other visitors vanished without a trace. But, recently, tantalizing leads have emerged and only Tempe can unravel them.

The study of twins and the genetics of aggression totally consumes research scientist Jeannie Ferrami. An accomplished and headstrong researcher, Jeannie has developed a sophisticated software program to identify identical twins reared apart. But Jeannie's breakthrough project is threatened by the appearance of a sudden impossibility - identical twins born weeks apart to different mothers at separate locations.

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.

Suspicious deaths. Broken bonds. Lives in peril. Redemption. Past-haunted emergency physician Zack Winston and case-hardened defense attorney Bridget Larsen battle a malicious malpractice suit. They uncover a medical conspiracy trading in drugs and murder. As they peel back layers of truth, past relationships and current alliances destabilize-threatening both their lives. A new bond ignites between them.

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.

Dr. Rhea Lynch left a suffocating life in Charleston to practice medicine in the ER of a small South Carolina Hospital. Now, Dawkins County is her home, a place that holds the only real family she's ever known. But when she returns from vacation, Rhea is shocked to discover that her best friend, Marisa, is near death and unable to communicate. The official diagnosis: a paralyzing stroke. Despite the family's attempts to keep her away, Rhea is determined to make her own diagnosis.

Dr. Morton Handler practiced a strange brand of psychiatry. Among his specialties were fraud, extortion, and sexual manipulation. Handler paid for his sins when he was brutally murdered in his luxurious Pacific Palisades apartment. The police have no leads, but they do have one possible witness: seven-year-old Melody Quinn.

Nerves of Steel introduces Dr. Cassandra Hart, a Pittsburgh ER doctor who discovers that her very own hospital is the source of a deadly street drug. When her best friend is murdered and Cassie starts getting death threats, she must trust Detective Mickey Drake to protect her. Yet even as a passionate love affair blossoms between them, a relentless killer draws ever closer.

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.

When a mass grave containing 18 mutilated female corpses is discovered in Shanghai, detective Li Yan is sent from Beijing to establish if the bodies are linked to an unsolved murder in the capital. Here, Li will be working with Mei Ling, deputy head of Shanghai's serious crime squad. Mei Ling is a formidable woman: a fact that is not lost on Li's on-again, off-again lover, forensic pathologist Margaret Campbell. But when Campbell learns that the victims were subjected to "live" autopsies, she swallows her pride and joins Li Yan and Mei Ling in the hunt for the murderer.

A grotesquely burned corpse found in a city park is a troubling mystery for Beijing detective Li Yan. Yan, devoted to his career as a means of restoring the respect his family lost during the Cultural Revolution, needs outside help if he is to break the case. The unidentified cadaver in turn provides a welcome distraction for forensic pathologist Margaret Campbell. Campbell, married to her work and having left America and her broken past behind, throws herself into the investigation and before long uncovers a bizarre anomaly.

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.

Special Forces soldier and medic Walter River would give anything to snatch more than a few seconds of down time to see if he can rattle the no-nonsense and incredibly hot Dr. Lloyd he's protecting, but dodging explosions, snipers, and student radicals who've unleashed a lethal bio-engineered microorganism have made that almost impossible. Maybe he'll get a chance - if he can figure out how to keep them both alive.

There is not much left of the irascible Albert Evan Jasper, "dean of American forensic anthropologists," after his demise in a fiery car crash. But in accord with his wishes, his remains are installed in an Oregon museum to create a fascinating if macabre exhibit. All agree that it is a fitting end for a great forensic scientist - until what is left of him disappears in the midst of the biannual meeting of the august WAFA - the Western Association of Forensic Anthropologists - in nearby Bend, Oregon. Like his fellow attendees, Gideon Oliver - the Skeleton Detective - is baffled.