It’s the week before Christmas and Dr. Kay Scarpetta—prompted by the tanking economy to offer her services pro bono to New York City’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME)—has completed her third autopsy of the day. She had saved the worst for last. The manner and cause of death of twenty-six-year-old Toni Darien was depressingly mundane and hadn’t required a lengthy postmortem examination to answer the most rudimentary questions. It was clear that she was a homicide from blunt force trauma: a single blow to the back of her head by an object that possibly had a surface at least partially painted yellow. What didn’t make sense was everything else. When Darien’s body was discovered shortly before dawn at the edge of Central Park near East 110th Street—her running pants and panties down around her ankles, her fleece and sports bra pushed above her breasts, a polartec scarf tied in a double knot tightly around her neck—responders to the scene assumed she had been jogging late the night before when she was sexually assaulted and murdered…strangled with an article of her own clothing. There was just one problem. The body was telling a different story, and as Scarpetta well knows the body doesn’t lie.

In THE SCARPETTA FACTOR, Patricia Cornwell shows once again why she remains the world’s #1 best-selling crime writer year after year as she weaves together her trademark blend of masterful storytelling, absorbing forensic detail, and characters that grow more complex and interesting with each book. Packed with unrelieved tension and constant surprises, this latest Cornwell crime thriller will surely stand alone as one of the author’s best. The seventeenth novel in Cornwell’s New York Times bestselling series finds the familiar cast of characters together again in New York. Marino is working for the NYPD; Benton Wesley uses his forensic psychological expertise at Bellevue; and Lucy continues to dazzle with her knowledge in forensic computer investigations as she works yet another case with Assistant District Attorney Jaime Berger. As for Scarpetta, her CNN producer wants her to launch a TV show called The Scarpetta Factor. Given the bizarre events already in play, she fears that her growing fame will generate the illusion that she has a “special factor,” a mythical ability to solve all her cases. She also wonders if she will end up like other TV personalities: her own stereotype. THE SCARPETTA FACTOR is yet further proof that Cornwell is in a class by herself—a master storyteller with a cast of unforgettable characters at the top of her craft.