"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 travels to North Carolina to investigate the murder of an eleven-year-old girl, but the evidence does not add up, and she must conduct a gruesome experiment at a remote research facility to find the answers, in a new edition of the classic thriller, complete with a new introduction by the author.