Leaving behind her Charleston forensic pathology practice to accept an assignment in New York City, Kay Scarpetta learns the story of an injured psychiatric patient who claims he was attacked by a stalker who was killing someone else at the time.

Now freelancing from south Florida, Dr. Kay Scarpetta returns to her old haunts in Richmond, Virginia, only to encounter a host of baffling and unwelcome surprises as she investigates the death of a fourteen-year-old girl.

Natalia, a young doctor on a medical mission to an orphanage in the Balkans, ponders the mystery of her beloved grandfather's recent death. She finds the answers she seeks in the story of an abused deaf-mute woman in the village of his childhood who formed a bond with a tiger that escaped from the zoo following the German bombardment

Trevor Benson never intended to move back to New Bern, North Carolina. But when a mortar blast outside the hospital where he worked as an orthopedic surgeon sent him home from Afghanistan with devastating injuries, the dilapidated cabin he'd inherited from his grandfather seemed as good a place to regroup as any. Tending to his grandfather's beloved bee hives while preparing for a second stint in medical school, Trevor isn't prepared to fall in love...