Book of the Dead: Scarpetta (Book 15)

Patricia Cornwell

Sep 2008 · Kay Scarpetta Book 15 · Sold by Penguin

About this ebook

Scarpetta, an all-new Original Series, is out now on Prime Video!

Enter the chilling and captivating world of Dr. Kay Scarpetta before Nicole Kidman and Jamie Lee Curtis bring the mystery to life onscreen.

“The new audience will be compelled by the characters, crimes, and mysteries that are the trifecta of Patricia’s masterful storytelling… and a warning……there WILL be BLOOD.” – Jamie Lee Curtis

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Dr. Kay Scarpetta must solve a string of murders more baffling—and terrifying—than any that have come before.

The Book of the Dead is the morgue log, the ledger in which all cases are entered by hand. For Kay Scarpetta, however, it is about to acquire a new meaning.

Starting over with a unique private forensic pathology practice in the historic city of Charleston, South Carolina, seems like the ideal situation for Dr. Kay Scarpetta and her colleagues, Pete Marino and her niece, Lucy. But then come the deaths . . .

A sixteen-year-old tennis star, fresh from a tournament win in Charleston, is found nude and mutilated near Piazza Navona in Rome. The body of an abused young boy is dumped in a desolate marsh. A woman is ritualistically murdered in her multimillion-dollar beach home. Meanwhile, in New England, problems with a prominent patient at a Harvard-affiliated psychiatric hospital begin to hint at interconnections among the deaths that are as hard to imagine as they are horrible.

Scarpetta has dealt with many brutal and unusual crimes before, but never has she seen anything like what she’s facing now. Before she is through, that book of the dead will contain many names—and the pen may be poised to write her own. . . .

Ratings and reviews

This book was dark, unsettling, and ultimately unsatisfying. However, I continue to be mesmerized by Mrs. Cornwell's prose and writing style, and masochistically proceed to read her books to the very end. I'm sure I'll be reading her next books as well.

Very Interesting. See a whole new side of Marino. My download was faulty and did not get last 60 pages of book so I never get to know Lucy's , Marino's or the wedding outcomes. Disappointed in Google books.

I started & couldn't put this one down. To me, one of Patricia Cornwell's best. Full of drama, celebraties (of a sort), technologically amazing, it also delves deeply into psychology on a multiply - layered scale. Cornwell remains a favorite!

About the author

Patricia Cornwell is one of the world’s major internationally bestselling authors, translated into thirty-six languages in more than 120 countries. She is a founder of the Virginia Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine; a founding member of the National Forensic Academy; a member of the Advisory Board for the Forensic Sciences Training Program at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, New York City; and a member of the Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital’s National Council, where she is an advocate for psychiatric research. In 2008, Cornwell won the Galaxy British Book Awards’ Books Direct Crime Thriller of the Year—the first American to win this prestigious award. In 2011, she was awarded the Medal of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the Ministry of Culture in Paris. Her earlier works include Postmortem—the only novel to win five major crime awards in a single year—and Cruel & Unusual, which won Britain’s Gold Dagger Award for best crime novel of 1993. Dr. Kay Scarpetta herself won the 1999 Sherlock Award for the best detective created by an American author.