Addictive Books

Patricia Cronwell's first book in the Kay Scarpetta series is about a brilliant serial killer who is strangling young women. Kay is applying latest forensic techniques to identify the killer, but someone is sabotaging the investigation.

Kay Scarpetta gets involved in the case of a brutal stabbing death: romance writer Beryl Madison. Madison's greedy lawyer accuses Scarpetta of losing his client's latest manuscript, an autobiographical expose of Beryl's early life as protégé of a legendary novelist. As more deaths occur, Kay finds herself also having to deal with the unexpected reappearance of long-lost lover Mark James.

In Richmond, Virginia, young lovers are dying. So far, four couples in the area have disappeared, only to be found months later as mutilated corpses. When the daughter of the president's newest drug czar vanishes along with her boyfriend, Dr. Kay Scarpetta knows time is short.

Convicted murderer Ronnie Joe Waddell is pronounced dead in the electric chair and Scarpetta prepares for his post mortem. But then the grotesquely wounded body of a young boy is found propped against a rubbish skip. The two cases seem unrelated, until Scarpetta recalls that the body of Waddell's victim had been arranged in a strikingly similar position.