It’s Chief Medical Examiner Dr Kay Scarpetta’s birthday, and while she’s enjoying a leisurely morning, a man is shot dead five minutes from her house. The bullet tore through him as he unloaded groceries from his car. Yet nobody heard or saw a thing. It looks like the work of a serial sniper – one who leaves no trace except for tiny copper fragments, and whose seemingly impossible shots cause instant death. As Scarpetta investigates, uncovering details that only she can analyze, she begins to suspect that the killer is sending her a message. Adding to Scarpetta’s growing unease is the sense that those closest to her are keeping secrets. And when her pursuit of the sniper takes Scarpetta to a shipwreck off the Florida coast, she comes face to face with shocking evidence that implicates her niece Lucy – Scarpetta’s very own flesh and blood… PRAISE FOR PATRICIA CORNWELL & THE KAY SCARPETTA NOVELS: ‘Cornwell’s books run on high octane fuel, a cocktail of adrenalin and fear’ The Times ‘Forget the pretenders. Cornwell reigns’ Mirror ‘When it comes to the forensic sciences, nobody can touch Cornwell’ New York Times Book Review ‘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 ‘Dazzling… After reading Cornwell’s thriller, most others will pale in comparison’ Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ‘Magnificent plotting, masterful writing, and marvelous suspense’ Booklist ‘Cornwell’s instincts are dead-on.’ Chicago Sun-Times ‘Cornwell remains a master of the genre, instilling in readers an appetite that only she can satisfy’ Publishers Weekly ‘In Kay Scarpetta, Patricia Cornwell has a character as strong as any in popular fiction’ Wall St. Journal ‘Cornwell fabricates intricate plot twists and paces the action at an ankle-turning clip’ New York Times Book Review ‘Cornwell has the milieu down cold’ Los Angeles Daily News ‘Cornwell gets her Hitchcock on . . . [She] can generate willies with subtle poetic turns’ People ‘Plots within plots, fraught atmosphere, and unrelenting suspense keep readers on tenterhooks while one trap after another springs under unwary feet’ Los Angeles Times ‘Fascinating… Vivid… Scarpetta is here to stay!’ Los Angeles Times Book Review ‘To Cornwell's considerable credit, the unease arises ultimately not from the steady potential for violence, but from a more profound horror: the vulnerability of a good woman like Kay to a world beset by the corrupt, the cruel, the demonic’ Publishers Weekly ‘Cornwell is the class act’ Vogue ‘Scarpetta is a tenacious, principled investigator who's the one voice of reason in a story fraught with bizarre unreason’ Booklist —