Forensic Mystery Fiction

Eve Duncan became a forensic sculptor after the disappearance of her daughter Bonnie, whose remains were discovered...yet unrecognizable. Driven by a need to liberate innocence from the shroud of death, she obsesses over recreating the likenesses of faceless, decomposed murder victims, using only their bare skulls as a guide.

Piper is a lich-doctor, a physician who works among the dead, determining causes of death for the city guard's investigations. It's a peaceful, if solitary profession . . . until the day when he's called to the river to examine the latest in a series of mysterious bodies, mangled by some unknown force. Galen is a paladin of a dead god, lost to holiness and no longer entirely sane. He has long since given up on any hope of love. But when the two men and a brave gnole constable are drawn into the maze of the mysterious killer, it's Galen's job to protect Piper from the traps that await.

They call it the Bone Box. A collection of old cases, solved and unsolved, that continue to haunt forensic pathologist Birdy Waterman. None is more disturbing than the first. After two decades, Birdy still remembers the screaming. The blood on the boy's hands. The body of a girl, butchered in the woods. Birdy's testimony helped put her own cousin behind bars. It was a sacrifice for what she thought was right - but now, 20 years later, she wants to reopen the box.

Bristol detective DS George Cross, champion of the outsider, the voiceless and the dispossessed. DS George Cross can be rude, difficult and awkward with people. But his unfailing logic and dogged pursuit of the truth means his conviction rate is the best on the force. An outsider himself, having been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, DS Cross is especially drawn to cases concerning the voiceless and the dispossessed. Now, Cross is untangling the truth about a young woman who died three days ago.

DS George Cross can be rude, difficult and awkward with people. But his unfailing logic and dogged pursuit of the truth means his conviction rate is the best on the force. So when his police colleagues dismiss the death of a man as a squabble among Bristol's homeless community, Detective Sergeant George Cross is not convinced.

Suspicious deaths. Broken bonds. Lives in peril. Redemption. Past-haunted emergency physician Zack Winston and case-hardened defense attorney Bridget Larsen battle a malicious malpractice suit. They uncover a medical conspiracy trading in drugs and murder. As they peel back layers of truth, past relationships and current alliances destabilize-threatening both their lives. A new bond ignites between them.

After an exchange student with bubonic plague turns up in a Reno hospital, a contractor with identical symptoms dies in Los Angeles. The government‘s official stance is that the cases are isolated and the outbreak is under control. But George Mack, a 30-year public health veteran, quickly realizes this is no ordinary plague. The death toll is too high, and the spread pattern make no sense. As Reno’s hospitals fill with victims, Mack begins to believe that there is more to the epidemic than the CDC is letting on - and that he must take drastic steps if he hopes to save his city.

When Gwen Marcey's dog comes home with a human skull and then leads her to a cabin in the woods near her Montana home, she realizes there's a serial killer in her community. And when she finds a tortured young girl clinging to life on the cabin floor, she knows this killer is a lunatic. Yet what unsettles Gwen most is that the victim looks uncannily like her daughter. The search for the torturer leads back in time to a neo-Nazi bombing in Washington state - a bombing with only one connection to Montana: Gwen.

Dr. Rhea Lynch left a suffocating life in Charleston to practice medicine in the ER of a small South Carolina Hospital. Now, Dawkins County is her home, a place that holds the only real family she's ever known. But when she returns from vacation, Rhea is shocked to discover that her best friend, Marisa, is near death and unable to communicate. The official diagnosis: a paralyzing stroke. Despite the family's attempts to keep her away, Rhea is determined to make her own diagnosis.

Enveloped in the dark inner kingdom of her schizophrenia, 16-year-old Deborah is haunted by private tormentors that isolate her from the outside world. With the reluctant and fearful consent of her parents, she enters a mental hospital where she will spend the next three years battling to regain her sanity with the help of a gifted psychiatrist. As Deborah struggles toward the possibility of the "normal" life she and her family hope for, the listener is inexorably drawn into her private suffering and deep determination to confront her demons.

Isobel McKenzie is an experienced and intuitive psychotherapist who is on sabbatical while recovering from illness. Reluctantly she goes to London to help out an old friend, solicitor Peter Wright, who is uneasy about the partisan nature of a proposed divorce settlement. He asks her to meet the couple, Thomas and Anne Banks, to assess the situation. Is Anne, a recovering alcoholic, possibly being coerced into signing an agreement which not only gives Thomas control of all their assets but also sole custody of their son? Isobel immediately senses that something is awry and, despite herself, ...

Forensic artist Gwen Marcey is between jobs when she accepts temporary work in Pikeville, Kentucky - a small town facing big-city crime. But before Gwen can finish her first drawing of the serial rapist who is on the loose, the latest witness vanishes. Just like all the others. Gwen suspects a connection between the rapist and the "accidental" deaths that are happening around town, but the local sheriff has little interest in her theories. When her digitally-obsessed teenage daughter joins her, Gwen turns her attention to a second assignment.

As a physician in the ER of a rural South Carolina hospital, Dr. Rhea Lynch is a dedicated healer, a woman of science, and to some degree, a skeptic. But her most fundamental beliefs are put to the test with the arrival of a traveling faith healer, whose "cures" produce some baffling mysteries: a young quadriplegic woman can suddenly move her arms; a chronic pain sufferer begins to dance again. Events go from bizarre to deadly with the arrival of a gravely injured but violent young woman determined to practice a dark, deadly magic.

Everything has changed for Ruth Galloway. She has a new job, home, and partner, and she is no longer North Norfolk police’s resident forensic archaeologist. That is, until convicted murderer Ivor March offers to make DCI Nelson a deal. Nelson was always sure that March killed more women than he was charged with. Now March confirms this and offers to show Nelson where the other bodies are buried - but only if Ruth will do the digging. Curious, but wary, Ruth agrees.

After a harrowing experience with an obsessed patient, oncology nurse practitioner Leigh Weston needed a change. She thought she'd left her troubles behind when she moved home to Carrington, North Carolina, and took a job in the emergency department of the local hospital. But when someone tampers with her brakes, she fears the past has chased her into the present. She reaches out to her high school friend turned homicide investigator, Ryan Parker, for help. Ryan finds satisfaction in his career, but his favorite way to use his skills is as a volunteer underwater investigator.

There is a patch of ground in Tennessee dedicated to the science of death, where human remains lie exposed to be studied for their secrets. The real-life scientist who founded the "Body Farm" has broken cold cases and revolutionized forensics...and now he spins an astonishing tale inspired by his own experiences. Renowned anthropologist Dr. Bill Brockton has spent his career surrounded by death at the Body Farm. Now he's being called upon to help solve a baffling puzzle in a remote mountain community.

For 155 days, Will Foster has been locked in medical quarantine without his consent. The doctors claim he is infected with a deadly virus, but this is a lie. Encoded in his DNA is a mutation that provides immunity from disease for all who possess it, source code that Vyrogen Pharmaceuticals aims to commercialize as a multi-billion dollar gene therapy. Against all odds, Foster escapes his laboratory prison and steals a virulent strain of bubonic plague as insurance. To help him unravel the mystery inside him, Foster contacts the only person he can trust - a former lover and microbiologist living Vienna - and the two become fugitives.

Deep in the primeval rainforest of Washington state's Olympic Peninsula, the skeletal remains of a murdered man are discovered. And a strange, unsettling tale begins to unfold, for forensic anthropologist Gideon Oliver determines that the murder weapon was a primitive bone spear of a type not seen for the last 10,000 years. And whoever - or whatever - hurled it did so with seemingly superhuman force. Bigfoot "sightings" immediately crop up, but Gideon is not buying them.

Forensic psychologist and rookie FBI agent Alexis Forrest returns to her hometown of Broken Hill to investigate the disappearance of a missing teenage girl. Returning to this snowy New England town is the last thing Alexis wants to do. She has a strained relationship with her divorced parents whose relationship did not survive the disappearance and murder of Alexis’ older sister, or her dad’s prison sentence. The circumstances of this girl’s disappearance are surprisingly similar to her sister’s yet the local police aren’t exactly welcoming to an inexperienced FBI agent sent to ...

Anthropology Professor Gideon Oliver would prefer to keep his mind on his beautiful new bride, Julie, during their English honeymoon, but one intrusive question will not stop nagging at him: Who would want to steal a 30,000-year-old parieto-occipital calvarial fragment? Yet someone has lifted this chunk of prehistoric human skull from a musty museum in Dorchester. Then, 30 miles away, an archaeology student is murdered, increasing tension and suspicion at a dig that had already seethed with suspicion, rivalry, and mistrust.