The Scarpetta collection
(Book)

Four women with nothing in common are brutalized by a brilliant psycopath who leaves no clues. When the police come up empty-handed, Kay Scarpetta, a skilled and unrelenting medical examiner, gets the call. But someone inside her lab wants to kill her investigation--worse, someone wants to kill her, too!

Someone is after Beryl Madison-- spying on her, making threatening phone calls. Terrified, she flees to Key West. When she comes back home it's not harrassment that's waiting-- it's murder. Someone kills her, someone she trusted enough to open her door to.

Pathologist Kay Scarpetta seeks to identify the killer of five young couples, all murdered within a 50-mile radius of Williamsburg.

"Killing me won't kill the beast" are the last words of rapist-murderer Ronnie Joe Waddell, written four days before his execution. But they can't explain how Dr. Kay Scarpetta finds Waddell's fingerprints on another crime scene -- after she'd performed his autopsy. If this is some sort of game, Scarpetta seems to be the target. And if the next victim is someone she knows, the punishment will be cruel and unusual