Port Mortuary (Kay Scarpetta Series #18)

by Patricia Cornwell

Overview

Scarpetta, an all-new Original Series, is coming soon to 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• More than twenty years into her career, Kay Scarpetta is confronted with a case that could ruin her professionally—and personally . . .

Kay Scarpetta’s secret military ties have drawn her to Dover Air Force Base and Port Mortuary, where she’s performing autopsies on fallen soldiers. But her new headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts—the Cambridge Forensic Center—is the first civilian facility in the U.S. to do virtual autopsies, and it is there that she encounters a devastating event.

A young man has died, apparently from a cardiac arrhythmia, eerily close to Scarpetta’s new Cambridge home. But when his body is examined the next morning, there are stunning indications that he may have been alive when he was zipped inside a pouch and locked inside the Center’s cooler. Various 3-D radiology scans reveal more shocking details about internal injuries unlike any Scarpetta has ever seen—details that suggest the possibility of a conspiracy to cause mass casualties. With Benton, Marino, and Lucy at her side, Scarpetta must fight a cunning, cruel—and invisible—enemy in a race against time. . . .

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780425243602
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/30/2011
Series:	Kay Scarpetta Series
Pages:	512
Product dimensions:	4.26(w) x 7.39(h) x 1.08(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

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.

Hometown:

Boston, MA and New York, NY

Date of Birth:

June 9, 1956

Place of Birth:

Miami, Florida

Education:

B.A. in English, Davidson College, 1979; King College

Website:

http://www.patriciacornwell.com

Editorial Reviews

Two baffling cases of treacherous murder, one long past and one all too recent, dominate this new Kay Scarpetta novel. A South African hate crime at the very beginning of her career merges with a heinous slaying that could be the portent of mass terror. Intense forensic action. Now in mass market paperback and NOOK Book.

Praise for Patricia Cornwell and the Scarpetta series:

“Cornwell brings [compulsive murderers] to full, frightening life.”—The New York Times Book Review
 
“Cornwell remains the master of incorporating real-life science into pulse-pounding fiction.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer
 
“Cornwell has created a character so real, so compelling, so driven that this reader has to remind herself regularly that Scarpetta is just a product of an author’s imagination.”—USA Today
 
“Cornwell certainly is skilled at dissecting the not always attractive innards of human nature.”—Forbes

From the Publisher

The 18th installment of Cornwell's best-selling series (after The Scarpetta Factor) weaves together ghosts of Kay Scarpetta's murky military past with modern-day high-tech terrorism. Scarpetta is finishing a fellowship at Dover Air Force Base, where she spends her days dealing in dead U.S. soldiers arriving at Port Mortuary—literally a port for the dead. Meanwhile, back at the Massachusetts-based Cambridge Forensic Center (CFC), where she is the director, disaster is brewing when evidence seems to indicate that a young man may still have been alive when his body was locked up inside the CFC's cooler. As Scarpetta begins to investigate this death, she is astounded to discover wounds inflicted by a new weapon unfamiliar to her. Scarpetta and her team soon realize that a terrifying new nanotechnology is being employed for evil purposes. Cornwell breathes new life into timeworn characters and captivates readers with intensive character development and a detailed plot.Verdict Fans of the Scarpetta series will be clamoring for this fast-paced foray into the intriguing world of forensic science and technological terrorism. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/10.]—Amy M. Handley, Kent State Univ., Columbus, OH

Library Journal

Quite a homecoming for Dr. Kay Scarpetta after her six months at Dover Air Force Base—a corpse back in Cambridge that seems to have been locked away in a mortuary still alive.

The man who died a block from Scarpetta's home in Norton's Woods is surrounded by mystery. No one knows his name, how he was killed, whether he died of natural causes or who installed the tiny audio receivers in his headphones and why. The most baffling mystery, however, is why, after collapsing and dying without shedding a drop of blood, he began to bleed hours after being placed in a drawer at the Cambridge Forensic Center. The answer to this riddle, which will plunge Scarpetta up to her elbows in another memorable postmortem investigation, will connect the unknown man to two other murder victims—a star college quarterback and a 6-year-old boy—and to three recent victims of roadside Afghanistan bombs whose memory she thought she'd left behind in Dover. And the connection, some wickedly cutting-edge work in robotics and nanotechnology, gives Scarpetta the chance to interrupt her ongoing quarrels with her posse—her anti-authority niece Lucy, her ex-profiler husband Benton Wesley, her investigator Pete Marino—and show how much she knows about absolutely everything.

"While this is a work of fiction, it is not science fiction," Cornwell announces in a preliminary note. Well, maybe. Though it has little feeling for its new characters and shows the regulars wallowing in complications instead of developing them, there's less of the fulsome self-mythologizing that drove The Scarpetta Factor (2009).

Kirkus Reviews