Book description
A woman has vanished while digging a dinosaur bone bed in the remote
wilderness of Canada. Somehow, the only evidence has made its way to the
inbox of Chief Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta, over two thousand miles
away in Boston. She has no idea why.
But as events unfold with alarming speed, Scarpetta begins to suspect
the paleontologist's disappearance is connected to a series of crimes
much closer to home: a gruesome murder, inexplicable tortures, and trace
evidence from the last living creatures of the dinosaur age.
When she turns to those around her, Scarpetta finds that the danger and
suspicion have penetrated even her closest circles. Her niece Lucy
speaks in riddles. Her lead investigator Pete Marino and FBI husband
Benton Wesley have secrets of their own. Feeling alone and betrayed,
Scarpetta is tempted by someone from her past as she tracks a killer
both cunning and cruel. Patricia Cornwell's first crime novel, Postmortem
, was published in 1990 and became the first novel to win all the major
crime awards in a single year. In 2008 Cornwell won the Galaxy British
Book Awards' Books Direct Crime Thriller of the Year - the first
American ever to win this award. In 2011 she was awarded the Medal of
Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.
Often interviewed on US national television as a forensic consultant,
Cornwell is a founder of the Virginia Institute of Forensic Science and
Medicine; a founding member of the National Forensic Academy; a member
of the Advisory Board for the Forensic Sciences Training Program at the
Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, NYC and a member of the
Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital's National Council, where she is an
advocate for psychiatric research.
Fox have acquired the film rights to the Scarpetta novels, featuring
Angelina Jolie as Dr Kay Scarpetta. Cornwell's books are translated into
thirty-six languages across more than fifty countries, and she is
regarded as one of the major international bestselling authors.
