"Dr. Kay Scarpetta is working a suspicious death scene in Cambridge, Massachusetts when an emergency alert sounds on her phone. A video link lands in her text messages and seems to be from her computer genius niece Lucy. But how can it be? It's clearly a surveillance film of Lucy taken almost twenty years ago. As Scarpetta watches she begins to learn frightening secrets about her niece, whom she has loved and raised like a daughter. That film clip...

Dr. Kay Scarpetta opens a private forensic pathology practice in Charleston, South Carolina, only to find herself and her colleagues--Pete Marino and her niece, Lucy--confronted by a horrifying series of crimes that may have an underlying link.