The courtship of Vincent Cardworthy and Misty Berkowitz and the marriage of Holly Stergis and Guido Morris are marked by practical concerns, romance, surprises, luck, and no upper hands.

"The new Kay Scarpetta novel . . . . After working one of the worst mass killings in U.S. history, Scarpetta returns home to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Exhausted and ill, she's recovering at home when she receives an unsettling call. The body of a young woman has been discovered on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's rugby field. The victim, a graduate student named Gail Shipman, is oddly draped in ivory linen and posed in a way that is too...

Ten-year-old Lanie of Cambridge, Massachusetts, who loves nature and the outdoors, wants to go camping with her family but her favorite aunt teaches Lanie to find the wonders of nature anywhere, even in her own backyard.

When Scarpetta examines a young man's body, she discovers stunning indications that he may have been alive when he was zipped inside a pouch and locked inside the cooler of her new Cambridge Forensic Center in Massachusetts. Various 3-D radiology scans reveal more shocking details about internal injuries unlike any Scarpetta has ever seen. These suggest the possibility of a conspiracy to cause mass casualties, and she races against time to discover...