[A Scarpetta novel

Receiving a surveillance video of her niece taken twenty years earlier that reveals disturbing secrets, Dr. Kay Scarpetta becomes increasingly isolated as she realizes the dangerous legal implications of her niece's private life.

Receiving a grisly communication in the wake of an eminent Canadian paleontologist's disappearance, Kay Scarpetta investigates the discovery of a body in Boston Harbor and clues about other unsolved cases, a situation that makes Scarpetta wonder who she can trust.

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 deliberate to be the killer's first strike. A preliminary examination in the sea of red mud where the body has been left also reveals a bizarre residue that fluoresces blood red, emerald green and sapphire blue. Physical evidence links the case to a series of uniquely weird homicides in Washington, D.C., where Scarpetta's FBI husband has been deployed to help capture a serial killer dubbed the Capital Murderer. The cases all connect and yet seem to conflict. Gail Shipman was murdered for financial gain--or was she? It will require the usual ensemble of characters to find out the truth, including Scarpetta's sidekick Pete Marino, who has undergone a drastic change in his life that places him center stage in a Cambridge investigation that puts everyone at risk" --.

Kay Scarpetta--now a senior forensic analyst for CNN--becomes embroiled in a surreal plot that includes a famous actor accused of an unthinkable sex crime and the disappearance of a beautiful millionairess with whom her niece Lucy seems to have shared a secret past.