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#3 in the Women's Murder Club Series
Detective Lindsay Boxer is jogging along a beautiful San Francisco street when a fiery explosion rips through the neighborhood. When Lindsay searches for survivors, she finds three people dead. A lost infant and a mysterious message at the scene leaves Lindsay and the San Francisco Police Department completely baffled. Then a prominent businessman is found murdered under bizarre circumstances, with another mysterious message left behind by the killer. Lindsay asks her friends Claire Washburn of the medical examiner's office, Assistant D.A. Jill Bernhardt, and Chronicle reporter Cindy Thomas to help her figure out who is committing these murders—and why they are intent on killing someone every three days. Even more terrifying, the killer has targeted a member of the Women's Murder Club. Which one will it be?
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#12 in the Kay Scarpetta Series
Dr. Kay Scarpetta is settling into her new life as a private forensic consultant and is deep into a case that has left colleagues in Louisiana profoundly disturbed. A woman is found dead in a seedy hotel, dressed to go out, keys in her hand. Her history of blackouts, and her violent outbursts while under their spell, offer more questions than clues about the cause of her death. Then Scarpetta receives news that chills her to the core: Jean-Baptiste Chandonne—the vicious and unrepentant Wolfman, who pursued her to her very doorstep—has asked to see her. From his cell on death row, he demands an audience with the legendary Dr. Scarpetta. With friends and family by her side, Scarpetta tries to guess what sort of endgame this madman has in mind and how, if at all, it's related to the Louisiana case. She begins to unravel a twisting, international conspiracy and then confronts the shock of her life: a blow that will force her to question the loyalty and trust of all she holds dear.
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#3 in the Grant County Series
Sara Linton, medical examiner in the small town of Heartsdale, GA, is called out to an apparent suicide on the local college campus, plunging her into a dark small town mystery. The mutilated body provides little in the way of clues—and the college authorities are eager to avoid a scandal—but for Sara and police chief Jeffrey Tolliver, things don't add up. Two more suspicious suicides follow, and a young woman is brutally attacked. For Sara, the violence strikes far too close to home. And as Jeffrey pursues the sadistic killer in a tense police procedural, he discovers that ex-police detective Lena Adams, now a security guard on campus, may be in possession of crucial information. But, bruised and angered by her expulsion from the force, Lena seems to be barely capable of protecting herself, let alone saving the next victim.
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Moynihan's search for the killer will propel him on a journey through the underground world of ancient eroticism, black-market reptiles, and religious cults, ultimately leading him to a Biblical scholar whose theories about the dawn of time provide a surprising link to the current investigation. But can Moynihan preserve his own sanity while delving into a secret as old as Cain? To solve this brutal case, Moynihan will have to reckon with one of the great mysteries of the ages: Who was The Second Woman? Originally published as The Serpent's Kiss in 2003.
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#8 in the Rosato & Associates Series
Lawyer Bennie Rosato is fighting the battle of her life—against her own twin. The action starts innocently enough, with a stolen wallet, but in no time events escalate, and Alice Connelly wreaks havoc that can be created only by a dead ringer. Connelly tries to destroy Bennie's law firm, Rosato & Associates, and then strikes at her very heart—which just happens to be otherwise engaged by a handsome, hunky stranger with the perfect amount of chest hair. But when a brutal murder occurs, Bennie realizes that the stakes have turned deadly. And the face of evil looks like her own.
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#2 in the Lydia Strong Series
Fresh from a tour promoting her last case, reclusive true crime writer Lydia Strong receives an anonymous cry for help, begging her to find and protect Tatiana Quinn, "and all the other girls in need of rescue." Maybe the plea strikes close to her heart; maybe her investigator's intuition starts buzzing. She takes it on. But this simple case of a missing teenager soon becomes much more. Someone wants Lydia to drop the case, someone powerful, someone anxious enough to engineer the reappearance of one of Lydia's first--and most dangerous--adversaries. Now, in addition to tracing the roots of Tatiana's disappearance on a trail across the country and eventually overseas, Lydia must find the man who wants her dead, his unfinished business from years ago.
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Decorated NYPD Officer John Coglin always thought his picture on the front page of the newspaper would be one for the scrapbook. That was before he had the bad luck to be forced into a witness-free, kill-or-be-killed confrontation with a drug-dealing thug. It's of no help to him that the incident took place during the run-up to a bitter mayoral election campaign, and that his adversary was sixteen years old and black. Now, instead of another commendation, Coglin is staring down the barrel of a media- and politics-stoked murder rap. But on the eve of his sure conviction arrives a fateful telephone call. It's not the governor, but his long-lost uncle, Aidan O'Connell. A veteran of the IRA and a recently released guest of San Quentin Penitentiary for armed-to-the-teeth robbery, Aidan offers his nephew a pardon that has nothing to do with lawyers. Coglin is about to find out that the type of amnesty Uncle Aidan is proposing is the kind that involves a beautiful but dangerous Mafia widow, a car trunk full of M-16s, and thirty million dollars in jewels smack dab in the middle of Rockefeller Center.
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#7 in the Rosato & Associates Series
Anne Murphy is the redheaded rookie at the Philadelphia law firm of Rosato & Associates, and one morning she wakes up to front-page headlines proclaiming LAWYER MURDERED—above her own picture. To find the killer, Anne's got to play dead—if she wants to stay alive. Though she tries to go it alone, she quickly realizes she'll have to trust people she barely knows—colleagues who hate her, a homicide squad that wants her out of the crime-fighting business, and a new love who inconveniently happens to be opposing counsel.
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#4 in the Lewis Cole Series
When retired Department of Defense analyst Lewis Cole stumbles upon a murdered man in a quiet state park near his coastal home in Tyler Beach, New Hampshire, he's determined to stay out of the case. But his plans are derailed when a team of federal agents arrives, claiming the victim was a drug courier and demanding Cole's assistance. With his life turned upside down, Cole reluctantly agrees to help, only to discover the agents have a hidden agenda. As he searches for answers, he's drawn into a web of intrigue involving a long-lost World War II secret, German U-boats, and international conspiracies. But the deeper he digs, the closer he comes to his own secretive past-one that cost him friendships and now threatens his very life.
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#2 in the Women's Murder Club Series
A brutal madman sprays bullets into a crowd of children leaving a San Francisco church. Miraculously-or was it intentionally?-only one person dies. Then an elderly black woman is hung. Police homicide inspector Lindsay Boxer senses a connection and together with medical examiner Claire, assistant D. A. Jill, and Chronicle reporter Cindy, finds a link that sends a chill through the entire nation. This killer's motives are unspeakable.
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#1 in the Lydia Strong Series
The childhood murder of her mother has turned Lydia Strong into a woman obsessed with bringing brutal killers to justice. The reclusive, bestselling true-crime writer and investigative consultant now spends her life chasing monsters. When three adults--loners, drifters--go missing, no one seems to notice except for Lydia. Enlisting the help of her friend, former FBI agent Jeffrey Mark, Lydia starts an investigation of her own. But when someone raises the stakes and goes after Lydia--just as fifteen years ago when she put the FBI on the trail of her mother's killer--the real hunt begins.
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#7 in the Alex Cross Series
Alex Cross has investigated macabre crime scenes. But the gruesome murders of two joggers in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park look like ritualistic killings that mimic the work of vampires, a solution local police and the FBI are quick to dismiss. Cross takes the case, sweeping him from Washington, DC, to Savannah, Las Vegas, New Orleans, and Los Angeles as he plunges into a netherworld of secret clubs, role-players, and posers. Evidence points to someone demented enough to have crossed the line from playacting to real blood. Someone like the merciless criminal known as the Mastermind, who's been lurking on the fringes, stalking, taunting, and threatening Alex Cross and everything he holds dear.
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#2 in the Amanda Jaffe Series
Daniel Ames is living the American dream. Though born into poverty and living on the streets by the age of fifteen, Daniel has overcome every obstacle -- and now is an associate at Reed, Briggs, Portland's most prestigious law firm, earning more money than he ever imagined possible. But when Aaron Flynn enters his life, Daniel finds himself caught between his towering ambition and his bedrock idealism. Flynn, a charismatic civil litigator, sues Geller Pharmaceuticals -- Reed, Briggs's biggest client -- for manufacturing a drug that he claims causes unspeakable birth defects. Daniel is certain the claim has no merit -- until a memo written by a Geller scientist is found, detailing the shocking results of a study that implicates the company in a horrific lie. Could Daniel unwittingly be helping Geller cover up a dark secret? As he begins to investigate, his world comes tumbling down around him. His work is sabotaged, he's accused of professional incompetence, and he's fired. Twelve hours later the man who fired him is murdered. Daniel is arrested. With help from two women, including lawyer Amanda Jaffe (whom we met in Wild Justice), Daniel scrambles to clear his name and save his reputation -- and in the process unearths a trail of deceit that leads back to a series of unsolved kidnappings seven years earlier. But someone doesn't want this trail explored, and Daniel becomes the target of a vicious killer who will stop at nothing to prevent the truth from being revealed.
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#1 in the Grant County Series
A small Georgia town erupts in panic when a young college professor is found brutally mutilated in the local diner. But it's only when town pediatrician and coroner Sara Linton does the autopsy that the full extent of the killer's twisted work becomes clear. Sara's ex-husband, police chief Jeffrey Tolliver, leads the investigation—a trail of terror that grows increasingly macabre when another local woman is found crucified a few days later. But he's got more than a sadistic serial killer on his hands, because the county's only female detective, Lena Adams—the first victim's sister—wants to serve her own justice. But it is Sara who holds the key to finding the killer. A secret from her past could unmask the brilliantly malevolent psychopath... or mean her death.
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After engineering the perfect crime, Tom Farrell evokes the anger of the Albanian mob, an associate--and IRA operative--is murdered, and his crew is attacked, forcing him to enter New York City's dark underworld, where he must confront his past in order to survive.
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#1 in the Women's Murder Club Series
Each one holds a piece of the puzzle: Lindsay Boxer is a homicide inspector in the San Francisco Police Department, Claire Washburn is a medical examiner, Jill Bernhardt is an assistant D.A., and Cindy Thomas just started working the crime desk of the San Francisco Chronicle. But the usual procedures aren't bringing them any closer to stopping the killings. So these women form a Women's Murder Club to collaborate outside the box and pursue the case by sidestepping their bosses and giving each other a hand. The four women develop intense bonds as they pursue a killer whose crimes have stunned an entire city. Working together, they track down the most terrifying and unexpected killer they have ever encountered—before a shocking conclusion in which everything they knew turns out to be devastatingly wrong.
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#11 in the Kay Scarpetta Series
Thwarting an attack by a suspected serial killer has inconceivably put Virginia's Chief Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta in the harsh glare of the spotlight. As her personal and professional lives come under suspicion, she discovers that the so-called Werewolf murders may have extended to New York City and into the darkest corners of her past. A formidable prosecutor, a female assistant district attorney from New York, is brought into the case—and Scarpetta must struggle to make what she knows to be the truth prevail against mounting and unnerving evidence to the contrary. Tested in every way, she turns inward to ask, Where do you go when there is nowhere left?
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#1 in the Amanda Jaffe Series
Thursday: Subject is still combative after four days of applied pain, sleep deprivation and minimal food. Vice squad detective Bobby Vasquez, for months on the trail of a slippery underworld figure, receives an anonymous tip that directs him to a mountain cabin. He races through the idyllic Oregon woods, expecting to close the book on a long-standing vendetta. What he finds instead opens a Pandora's box of horror that will haunt him to his dying day. 8:10: Subject bound and gaffed and placed in upstairs closet at end of hall. Turned out lights in house, drove off, then parked and doubled back. Watched from woods. Within hours, Vincent Cordoni -- a brilliant surgeon with a history of violence and drug abuse -- is arrested for a heinous crime. Facing a seemingly insurmountable wall of evidence, he turns to Portland's top criminal defense attorney, Frank Jaffe-who, along with his ambitious daughter, Amanda, must put on an inspired defense. Amanda's first taste of criminal defense work is as intoxicating as it is chilling, but it raises moral questions she's loath to address. Is she defending an innocent man? Or is she using her considerable skills to set a monster free? Then Cardoni disappears under bizarre circumstances. Four years later, a second set of murders has begun .... 8:55: Subject exits house, naked and barefoot, armed with kitchen knife. Remarkable strength of character. Breaking her will be a challenge. Has Cardoni resurfaced to ply his deadly trade anew? Is there a copycat killer? Or has the real killer been someone else all along? The police will do everything they can to stop Cardoni -- but they have to find him first. Following a twisting trail of clues, including a harrowing diary that clinically records the killer's horrible deeds, Amanda Jaffe and Bobby Vasquez join the hunt-and themselves become targets of the twenty-first century's first genuinely monstrous psychopath.
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#5 in the Rosato & Associates Series
When attorney Jack Newlin discovers his wife dead in their home, he's convinced he knows who killed her—and is equally determined to hide the truth. He decides to frame himself for murder, and to seal his fate he hires the most inexperienced lawyer he can find: a reluctant rookie by the name of Mary DiNunzio from the hot Philadelphia firm of Rosato & Associates. But hiring Mary may turn out to be his biggest mistake. She doubts Jack's confession, and her ethics and instincts tell her she can't defend a man who wants to convict himself. Smarter, gutsier, and more persistent than she has any right to be, Mary sets out to prove what really happened—because, as any lawyer knows, a case is never as simple as it seems. And nothing is ever certain until the final moment of truth.
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#10 in the Kay Scarpetta Series
The nightmare begins when a cargo ship arriving at Richmond's Deep Water Terminal from Belgium is discovered to be transporting a locked, sealed container holding the decomposed remains of a stowaway. The autopsy performed by Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta initially reveals neither cause of death nor an identification. But the victim's personal effects and an odd tattoo take Scarpetta on a hunt for information that leads to Interpol's headquarters in Lyon, France, where she receives critical instructions: Go to the Paris morgue to receive forbidden, secret evidence and then return to Virginia to carry out a mission. It is a mission that could ruin her career–and places her and the ones she holds dear at mortal risk.
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When struggling filmmaker Patrick Gallagher fishes a mutilated corpse out of a river, his retreat from life takes a sinister turn. After destroying his own career, Patrick had hoped to lick his wounds in the quiet of a small New England town, but the ghostly secrets of Lawton, Vermont prove all too ominous to allow for serenity. In the course of the investigation, Patrick befriends local policewoman Andi Nightingale, who is haunted by her own troubled past. As the suspense builds, Patrick and Andi are drawn into the shocking legacy of the town's shared-guilt over a crime kept hidden for a century...
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In 1972, ten years after a nuclear war decimated both the United States and Soviet Union, Carl Landry, a young reporter, searches for the killer of a veteran of the 1962 war and begins to suspect that the victim may have held the key to a terrifying conspiracy.
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#4 in the Rosato & Associates Series
Accused of committing cold-blooded murder, Alice Connolly wants one lawyer to defend her: Bennie Rosato. But the no-nonsense Philadelphia criminal attorney isn't interested—until she meets the accused killer face to face—and can't believe what she sees. Alice claims she's Bennie twin—and the woman does bear an uncanny resemblance to her. But Bennie grew up an only child. She doesn't have a sister. Or does she? Agreeing to take the case, Bennie plunges into the mystery of the murder and into the depths of her own past—a twisting search for justice and the truth that will keep the seasoned attorney guessing and leave readers breathless until the verdict is in.
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#3 in the Lewis Cole Series
When a mysterious arsonist strikes the sleepy town of Tyler Beach, leaving a trail of burned-down hotels in their wake, the police are left baffled and scrambling for a suspect. Retired Department of Defense analyst and local columnist Lewis Cole once again finds himself called in to solve a critical case. But the fugitive pyromaniac is just the beginning. When a monstrous act of violence shocks the tiny town, Lewis plunges into a high-profile hunt to unmask the culprit. Driven by his thirst for justice and his determination to prevent another assault, Lewis calls on the help of old friends-including Boston mob-connected "security consultant" Felix Tinios-to bring two criminals to justice. But as he dives deeper into a pool of possible suspects, Lewis is faced with disturbing truths that will push his skills to the brink. Can he protect the residents of Tyler Beach from another horrific attack? Or this time, has he met his match?
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#2 in the Andy Brazil Series
In Southern Cross, Cornwell takes us even closer to the personal and professional lives of big-city police, in a story of corruption, scandal, and robberies that escalate to murder. This time, her setting is Richmond, Virginia, where Charlotte Police Chief Judy Hammer has been brought by an NIJ grant to clean up the police force. Reeling from the recent death of her husband, and resented by the police force, city manager, and mayor of Richmond, Hammer is joined by her deputy chief Virginia West and rookie Andy Brazil on the most difficult assignment of her career. In the face of overwhelming public scrutiny, the trio must bring truth, order, and sanity to a city in trouble.
