Massachusetts Chief Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta has just returned from working a mass murder when she's awakened by Detective Pete Marino. A body, draped in an unusual cloth, has been discovered at MIT, and it's suspected it is computer engineer Gail Shipman. It appears she's been murdered, mere weeks before the trial in her $100 million lawsuit against her former financial managers. She also fears the case may have a connection with her computer...

Going from urban Chicago to the ivy-clad campus of Harvard University, Spencer Collins is surprised to be invited to apply to one of the school's elite final clubs, until he finds out that the club hides a shadowy group of powerful men.

Senator Ashley Butler fervidly opposes any legislation supporting biotechnology and strives to outlaw cloning. His adversary, Dr. Daniel Lowell, has almost perfected an innovative stem cell procedure that reverses the effects of several critical diseases. When Senator Butler learns that he has Parkinson's Disease, he puts his political beliefs aside and makes Lowell a surprising offer: he will become Lowell's guinea pig. But when the powerful new...

A hunt for a missing art lover engages Homer in a perplexing mystery Leonard Sheldrake knows little about Frieda except that he loves her. A Harvard professor and admirer of the bizarre engravings of M. C. Escher, Leonard is visiting a Cambridge exhibition of the artist's work when he meets Frieda and falls instantly in love. As they trade remarks about the artwork, he learns a few brief things about her. Though young, she is a widow, an orphan, and...

Lee Emery is an empty nester, contentedly married to a man she has known forever and hunkering down in the house where she grew up. She believes she is happy occupying such a familiar emotional and physical space. But questions of the path not taken start to haunt her after she publishes a memoir of her deliciously eccentric grandmother with whom she traipsed through Europe at eighteen. It was then that Lee fell in love for the first time. Twenty-five...

When an animal rights activist is killed by a hit-and-run driver on an icy Cambridge street, music critic Theda Krakow can't get too upset. Besides, Theda is busy investigating the rise of a dangerous new designer drug that threatens the musicians and fans who make up the popular club scene. But when Theda learns that the accident victim was defying her own radical group to rescue feral cats on the eve of a ferocious winter storm, she puts her own...

Harvard professor Wilson Chaney's position in life is hanging by a thread; his marriage, his reputation, not to mention his tenure at Harvard are in the hands of a blackmailer, someone threatening to sell Chaney's secrets at very high prices. His enviable life could disappear into thin air should the blackmailer's evidence-proof of his affair with a young student-become public knowledge. So he hires Boston private investigator Carlotta Carlyle to...

A college senior finds the usual pressures of first semester compounded by lingering memories of his freshman-year roommate's suicide, and the appearance of a playboy ghost with sinister intentions.

"It's beginning to look a lot like an American Christmas: irritable, unpleasant relatives; horrible weather, miserable travel; a slobbering dog - and one Jack Flanigan, "a harmless American of Irish origins," who is reluctantly but totally falling in love - with one Odessa Tatiana Alekseevna Shuskulya, a young woman from Russia who's studying at Harvard. (Jack, of course, is attending Boston College, the Jesuits' hangout in Chestnut Hill.)"--BOOK...