Cornwell, Patricia

A comprehensive and intriguing expos? of one of the world?s most chilling cases of serial murder?and the police force that failed to solve it. Vain and charismatic Walter Sickert made a name for himself as a painter in Victorian London. But the ghoulish nature of his art?as well as extensive evidence?points to another name, one that?s left its bloody mark on the pages of history: Jack the Ripper. Cornwell has collected never-before-seen archival material?including a rare mortuary photo, personal correspondence and a will with a mysterious autopsy clause, and applied cutting-edge forensic science to open an old crime to new scrutiny. Incorporating material from Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper?Case Closed, this new edition has been revised and expanded to include eight new chapters, detailed maps and hundreds of images that bring the sinister case to life.

In the quiet of twilight, on an early autumn day, twenty-six-year-old Elisa Vandersteel is killed while riding her bicycle along the Charles River. It appears she was struck by lightning--except the weather is perfectly clear with not a cloud in sight. Dr. Kay Scarpetta, the Cambridge Forensic Center's director and chief, decides at the scene that this is no accidental Act of God. Her investigation becomes complicated when she begins receiving a flurry of bizarre poems from an anonymous cyberbully who calls himself Tailend Charlie.

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 who and why before more people die.

"It is the week before Christmas. A tanking economy has prompted Dr. Kay Scarpetta - despite her busy schedule and her continuing work as the senior forensic analyst for CNN - to offer her services pro bono to New York City's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. In no time at all, her increased visibility seems to precipitate a string of unexpected and unsettling events, culminating in an ominous package--possibly a bomb--showing up at the front desk of the apartment building where she and her husband, Benton, live. Soon the apparent threat on Scarpetta's life finds her embroiled in a surreal plot that includes a famous actor accused of an unthinkable sex crime and the disappearance of a beautiful millionaire with whom her niece, Lucy, seems to have shared a secret past."--from novel.

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Dr. Kay Scarpetta returns to Richmond, Virginia, from freelancing in South Florida at the request of the recently appointed Chief Medical Examiner to solve the murder of a 14-year-old girl, but she finds that nothing is as she left it. Her former lab is being demolished; the chief isn't really the one who requested her; her former assistant chief has had personal problems that he refuses to reveal; and a glamorous FBI agent meddles with the case.