New Year's Eve and the final murder scene of Virginia's bloodiest year since the Civil War takes Dr Kay Scarpetta thirty feet below the Elizabeth River's icy surface. A scuba diver, Ted Eddings, is dead, an investigative reporter who was a favourite at the medical examiner's office. Was Edding's probing the frigid depths of the Inactive Shipyard for a story, or simply diving for sunken trinkets? And why did Scarpetta receive a phone call from someone reporting the death before the police were notified?

At 11:05 one December evening in Richmond, Virginia, convicted murderer Ronnie Jow Waddell is pronounced dead in the electric chair. At the morgue, Dr Kay Scarpetta waits for Waddell's body. Preparing to perform a post-mortem before a subject is dead is a strange feeling, but Scarpetta has been here before. And Waddell's death is not the only newsworthy event on this freezing night: the grotesquely wounded body of a young boy is found propped up against a rubbish skip. To Scarpetta. the two cases seem unrelated, until she recalls that the body of Waddell's victim had been arranged in a strikingly similar position.....

A serial killer is on the loose in Richmond, Virginia. Three women have died, brutalised and strangled in their own bedrooms. There is no pattern: the killer appears to strike at random - but always early on Saturday mornings. So when Dr Kay Scarpetta, Chief Medical Examiner, is awakened at 2:33am, she knows the news is bad, there is a fourth victim. And she fears now for those that will follow unless she can dig up new forensic evidence to aid the police.

Deputy Chief Virginia West has a mood to match the heat in the city of Charlotte. Another out-of town businessman has been found murdered in his hire car, a wise-ass detective has taken her parking slot, the new police headquarters still resembles a construction site and her boss is telling her to go out on patrol as escort to Andy Brazil, a rookie reporter on the local paper