Patricia Cornwell has 36 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 19 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.3★ across 317 ratings. The most-rated is Quantum: A Thriller.
Quantum: A Thriller
Summary
A USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Amazon Charts bestseller. International bestselling author Patricia Cornwell delivers pulse-pounding thrills in the first book in a series featuring a brilliant and unusual new heroine, cutting-edge cybertechnology, and stakes that are astronomically high. On the eve of a top secret space mission, Captain Calli Chase detects a tripped alarm in the tunnels deep below a NASA research center. A NASA pilot, quantum physicist, and cybercrime investigator, Calli knows that a looming blizzard and government shutdown could provide the perfect cover for sabotage, with deadly consequences. As it turns out, the danger is worse than she thought. A spatter of dried blood, a missing security badge, a suspicious suicide - a series of disturbing clues point to Calli’s twin sister, Carme, who’s been MIA for days. Desperate to halt the countdown to disaster and to clear her sister’s name, Captain Chase digs deep into her vast cyber security knowledge and her painful past, probing for answers to her twin’s erratic conduct. As time is running out, she realizes that failure means catastrophe - not just for the space program but for the safety of the whole nation. Brilliantly crafted, gripping, and smart, Patricia Cornwell’s cliffhanger ending will keep listeners wondering what’s next for Captain Calli Chase.
©2019 by Cornwell Entertainment, Incorporated. (P)2019 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.
Body of Evidence
Summary
Late one night Beryl Madison turns off her burglar alarm, puts down her gun and opens her door to the man who has stalked and terrorized her for months. Hours later, her brutally mutilated body lies in the city morgue. As Scarpetta begins searching for the microscopic clues to the killer’s identity, one question keeps nagging her: why did Beryl let him in?
©1991 Patricia D. Cornwell (P)1994 Recorded Books, LLC
Postmortem
Summary
Four young women have been found murdered—tortured and strangled in their own beds—all victims of the same brilliant monster. Using a skilled hand and the latest technology in forensic medicine, Kay Scarpetta begins the process of gathering the microscopic clues the latest battered body has to give.
©1990 Patricia D. Cornwell (P)1993 Recorded Books, LLC
All That Remains
Summary
A serial killer is stalking Virginia’s young lovers, taking their lives and taunting police with a single clue: a jack of hearts. For two years, the meaning of this card has eluded FBI investigators. But as Scarpetta begins searching the victims’ remains for microscopic clues, she begins to suspect that someone in the FBI knows more about the murderer.
©1992 Patricia D. Cornwell (P)1995 Recorded Books, LLC
Chaos
Summary
New York Times best-selling author Patricia Cornwell returns with the remarkable 24th thriller in her popular high-stakes series starring medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta. In the quiet of twilight, on an early autumn day, 26-year-old Elisa Vandersteel is killed while riding her bicycle along the Charles River. It appears she was struck by lightning - except the weather is perfectly clear, with not a cloud in sight. Dr. Kay Scarpetta, the Cambridge Forensic Center's director and chief, decides at the scene that this is no accidental act of God. Her investigation becomes complicated when she begins receiving a flurry of bizarre poems from an anonymous cyberbully who calls himself Tailend Charlie. Though subsequent lab results support Scarpetta's conclusions, the threatening messages don't stop. When the 10th poem arrives exactly 24 hours after Elisa's death, Scarpetta begins to suspect the harasser is involved and sounds the alarm to her investigative partner, Pete Marino, and her husband, FBI analyst Benton Wesley. She also enlists the help of her niece, Lucy. But to Scarpetta's surprise, tracking the slippery Tailend Charlie is nearly impossible, even for someone as brilliant as her niece. Also, Lucy can't explain how this anonymous nemesis could have access to private information. To make matters worse, a venomous media is whipping the public into a frenzy, questioning the seasoned forensics chief's judgment and "a quack cause of death on a par with spontaneous combustion".
©2016 Cornwell Entertainment, Inc. (P)2016 HarperCollins Publishers
Book of the Dead
Summary
The "book of the dead" is the morgue log, a ledger in which all cases are entered by hand. For Kay Scarpetta, however, it is about to take on a new meaning. Fresh from her bruising battle with a psychopath in Florida, Scarpetta decides it's time for a change of pace. Moving to Charleston, South Carolina, she opens a unique private forensic pathology practice, one in which she and her colleagues, including Pete Marino and her niece, Lucy, offer expert crime-scene investigation and autopsy services to communities lacking local access to competent death investigation and modern technology. It seems like an ideal situation, until the new battles start: with local politicians, with entrenched interests, with someone whose covert attempts at sabotage are clearly meant to run her out of town. And that's before the murders and other violent deaths even begin. A 16-year-old tennis star, fresh from a tourament win in Charleston, is found nude and mutilated near Piazza Navona in Rome. The body of an abused young boy is discovered dumped in a desolate marsh. A woman is found ritualistically murdered in her multimillion-dollar beach home. Meanwhile, in distant New England, problems with a prominent patient at a Harvard-affiliated psychiatric hospital begin to hint at interconnections that are as hard to imagine as they are horrible. Scarpetta has dealt with many brutal and unusual crimes before, but never any as baffling, or as terrifying, as the ones confronting her now. Before she is through, that book of the dead will contain many names - and the pen may be poised to write in her own.
©2007 Cornwell Enterprises, Inc (P)2007 Penguin Audio, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Red Mist
Summary
The new Kay Scarpetta novel from the world's #1 bestselling crime writer. Determined to find out what happened to her former deputy chief, Jack Fielding, murdered six months earlier, Kay Scarpetta travels to the Georgia Prison for Women, where an inmate has information not only on Fielding, but also on a string of grisly killings. The murder of an Atlanta family years ago, a young woman on death row, and the inexplicable deaths of homeless people as far away as California seem unrelated. But Scarpetta discovers connections that compel her to conclude that what she thought ended with Fielding's death and an attempt on her own life is only the beginning of something far more destructive: a terrifying terrain of conspiracy and potential terrorism on an international scale. And she is the only one who can stop it.
©2011 Patricia Cornwell (P)2011 Penguin Audio
The Scarpetta Factor
Summary
It is the week before Christmas. A tanking economy has prompted Dr. Kay Scarpetta - despite her busy schedule and her continuing work as the senior forensic analyst for CNN - to offer her services pro bono to New York City's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. In no time at all, her increased visibility seems to precipitate a string of unexpected and unsettling events. She is asked live on the air about the sensational case of Hannah Starr, who has vanished and is presumed dead. Moments later during the same telecast she receives a startling call-in from a former psychiatrist patient of Benton Wesley's. When she returns after the show to the apartment where she and Benton live, she finds an ominous package - possibly a bomb - waiting for her at the front desk. Soon the apparent threat on Scarpetta's life finds her embroiled in a surreal plot that includes a famous actor accused of an unthinkable sex crime and the disappearance of a beautiful millionaires with whom Lucy seems to have shared a secret past. Scarpetta's CNN producer wants her to launch a TV show called The Scarpetta Factor. Given the bizarre events already in play, she fears that her growing fame will generate the illusion that she has a "special factor", a mythical ability to solve all her cases. She wonders if she will end up like other TV personalities: her own stereotype. The Scarpetta Factor, the 17th in the series, finds the familiar cast of characters together again in New York. Marino is working for the NYPD; Benton Wesley uses his forensic psychological expertise at Kirby and Bellevue; and Lucy continues to dazzle with her expertise in forensic computer investigations as she works yet another case with New York prosecutor Jaime Berger.
©2009 Patricia Cornwell (P)2009 Penguin
Ripper
Summary
From New York Times bestselling author Patricia Cornwell comes Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert, a comprehensive and intriguing exposé of one of the world's most chilling cases of serial murder - and the police force that failed to solve it.
Vain and charismatic Walter Sickert made a name for himself as a painter in Victorian London. But the ghoulish nature of his art - as well as extensive evidence - points to another name, one that's left its bloody mark on the pages of history: Jack the Ripper. Cornwell has collected never-before-seen archival material - including a rare mortuary photo, personal correspondence and a will with a mysterious autopsy clause - and applied cutting-edge forensic science to open an old crime to new scrutiny.
Incorporating material from Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper - Case Closed, this new edition has been revised and expanded to include eight new chapters.
©2002, 2016 Cornwell Enterprises, Inc. (P)2016 Brilliance Audio, all right reserved.
Scarpetta
Summary
Leaving behind her private forensic pathology practice in Charleston, South Carolina, Kay Scarpetta accepts an assignment in New York City, where the NYPD has asked her to examine an injured man on Bellevue Hospital's psychiatric prison ward. The handcuffed and chained patient, Oscar Bane, has specifically asked for her, and when she has her gloved hands on him, he begins to talk - and the story he has to tell turns out to be one of the most bizarre she has ever heard. The injuries, he says, were sustained in the course of a murder...that he did not commit. Is Bane a criminally insane stalker who has fixed on Scarpetta? Or is his paranoid tale true, and it is he who is being spied on, followed and stalked by the actual killer? The one thing Scarpetta knows for certain is that a woman has been tortured and murdered - and more violent deaths will follow. Gradually, an inexplicable and horrifying truth emerges: Whoever is committing the crimes knows where his prey is at all times. Is it a person, a government? And what is the connection between the victims? In the days that follow, Scarpetta; her forensic psychologist husband, Benton Wesley; and her niece, Lucy, who has recently formed her own forensic computer investigation firm in New York, will undertake a harrowing chase through cyberspace and the all-too-real streets of the city - an odyssey that will take them at once to places they never knew, and much, much too close to home. Throughout, Cornwell delivers shocking twists and turns, and the kind of cutting-edge technology that only she can provide. Once again, she proves her exceptional ability to entertain and enthrall.
©2008 Patricia Cornwell (P)2008 Penguin Audiobooks
Trace
Summary
Trace is the heart-stopping new Dr. Kay Scarpetta thriller from America's #1 best-selling crime writer. Dr. Kay Scarpetta, now freelancing from south Florida, returns to the city that turned its back on her five years ago. In Trace, Scarpetta travels to Richmond, Virginia, at the odd behest of the recently appointed Chief Medical Examiner, who claims that he needs her help to solve a perplexing crime. When she arrives, however, Scarpetta finds that nothing is as she expected: her former lab is in the final stages of demolition; the inept chief isn't the one who requested her after all; her old assistant chief has developed personal problems that he won't reveal; and a glamorous FBI agent, whom Marino dislikes instantly, meddles with the case. Deprived of assistance from colleagues Benton and Lucy, who are embroiled in what first appears to be an unrelated attempted rape by a stalker, Scarpetta is faced with investigating the death of a 14-year-old girl and working with the smallest pieces of evidence, traces that only the most thorough hunters can identify. She must follow the twisting leads and track the strange details in order to make the dead speak, and to reveal the sad truth that may be more than even she can bear.
©2004 Cornwell Enterprises, Inc. (P)2004 Penguin Audio
Unnatural Exposure
Summary
Filled with tension and continual surprises, Unnatural Exposure is a thrilling chapter in Virginia Chief Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta's life, and a triumph for #1 New York Times best-selling author Patricia Cornwell. The body of an elderly woman is found dismembered in a Virginia landfill. Scarpetta initially believes the clues mirror that of a serial killer she's tracked before. But upon further investigation, she discovers puzzling pox-like erruptions on the woman's body that, perhaps, point in another direction. When the killer contacts her via e-mail, Scarpetta enlists the aid of her computer-savvy niece, Lucy, to help track this monster through cyberspace. Learning that the Virginia victim was exposed to a high-tech virus that might unleash an epidemic, Scarpetta realizes she's dealing with a sophisticated mind. Her investigation leads her from the government's biological defense facility in Utah, to Atlanta's Center for Disease Control, and eventually to quarrantine, when it is discovered that Scarpetta has been exposed to this fatal virus. Along the way, she's forced to deal with the unscrupulous ambitions of a slick FBI agent, Lucy's problems, and her own turbulent feelings for Agent Wesley Benton. Unnatural Exposure is the 8th book in the Kay Scarpetta series.
©1997 Patricia Daniels Cornwell (P)2002 Recorded Books, LLC
Port Mortuary
Summary
The new Kay Scarpetta novel from the world's numberon-one best-selling crime writer. "When it comes to the forensic sciences, nobody can touch Cornwell." (The New York Times Book Review) Port Mortuary, the title of Patricia Cornwell's 18th Scarpetta novel, is literally a port for the dead. In this fast-paced story, a treacherous path from Scarpetta's past merges with the high-tech highway she now finds herself on. We travel back to the beginning of her professional career, when she accepted a scholarship from the air force to pay off her medical school debt. Now, more than 20 years and many career successes later, her secret military ties have drawn her to Dover Air Force Base, where she has been immersed in a training fellowship. As the chief of the new Cambridge Forensic Center in Massachusetts, a joint venture of the state and federal governments, MIT, and Harvard, Scarpetta is confronted with a case that could shut down her new facility and ruin her personally and professionally.
©2010 Patricia Cornwell (P)2010 Penguin
Dust
Summary
After working one of the worst mass killings in U.S. history, Scarpetta returns home to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Exhausted and ill, she's recovering at home when she receives an unsettling call. The body of a young woman has been discovered on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's rugby field. The victim, a graduate student named Gail Shipman, is oddly draped in ivory linen and posed in a way that is too deliberate to be the killer's first strike. A preliminary examination in the sea of red mud where the body has been left also reveals a bizarre residue that fluoresces blood red, emerald green, and sapphire blue. Physical evidence links the case to a series of uniquely weird homicides in Washington, D.C., where Scarpetta's FBI husband has been deployed to help capture a serial killer dubbed the Capital Murderer. The cases all connect and yet seem to conflict. Gail Shipman was murdered for financial gain - or was she? It will require the usual ensemble of characters to find out the truth, including Scarpetta's sidekick Pete Marino, who has undergone a drastic change in his life that places him center stage in a Cambridge investigation that puts everyone at risk.
©2013 Patricia Cornwell (P)2013 Penguin Audio
Flesh and Blood
Summary
Number one New York Times best-selling author Patricia Cornwell delivers the next enthralling thriller in her high-stakes series starring Kay Scarpetta - a complex tale involving a serial sniper who strikes chillingly close to the forensic sleuth herself. It’s Dr. Kay Scarpetta’s birthday, and she’s about to head to Miami for a vacation with Benton Wesley, her FBI profiler husband, when she notices seven pennies on a wall behind their Cambridge house. Is this a kids’ game? If so, why are all of the coins dated 1981 and so shiny they could be newly minted? Her cellphone rings, and Detective Pete Marino tells her there’s been a homicide five minutes away. A high school music teacher has been shot with uncanny precision as he unloaded groceries from his car. No one has heard or seen a thing. In this 22nd Scarpetta novel, the master forensic sleuth finds herself in the unsettling pursuit of a serial sniper who leaves no incriminating evidence except fragments of copper. The shots seem impossible, yet they are so perfect they cause instant death. The victims appear to have had nothing in common, and there is no pattern to indicate where the killer will strike next. First New Jersey, then Massachusetts, and then the murky depths off the coast of South Florida, where Scarpetta investigates a shipwreck, looking for answers that only she can discover and analyze. And it is there that she comes face to face with shocking evidence that implicates her techo genius niece, Lucy, Scarpetta’s own flesh and blood.
©2014 Kay Scarpetta (P)2014 HarperCollins Canada
The Last Precinct
Summary
The eleventh Scarpetta novel, in which the chief medical examiner is under a grand jury investigation for murder. She knows she's being framed, and she no longer knows who she can trust.... Physically and psychologically bruised by her encounter with the killer Chandonne, Dr. Kay Scarpetta has to leave her home in the hands of the police team investigating the attack. She finds shelter with an old friend, Anna Zenner, but it is not the haven of security she needs when she discovers that Anna has been subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury that is investigating Scarpetta for murder. Kay knows she is being framed, and she knows she can trust no one. Meanwhile it appears that Chandonne killed a woman in New York before his murderous spree in Virginia, but when Scarpetta looks more closely into that case with New York prosecutor Jaime Berger, proof of his guilt is far from certain--in fact she begins to believe he may not be the perpetrator of any of the crimes of which he is accused. As she follows the forensic trail to the real killer, she gradually realizes that someone has been spinning a web for years with the aim of entrapping her. Who is it, and why are they so desperate to be rid of her?
©2000 Cornwell Enterpises, Inc. (P)2015 HarperCollins Publishers
Black Notice
Summary
Following the post mortem of a stowaway that reveals neither cause of death nor identity, Dr. Kay Scarpetta travels to Paris in search of information. In Paris she is given a secret mission--one that could ruin her career.
©1999 CEI Enterprises, Inc. (P)2015 HarperCollins Publishers
Cause of Death
Summary
On a quiet day, away from the hustle of Richmond, in a small cottage on the Virginia coast, Dr. Kay Scarpetta receives a disturbing phone call from the Chesapeake police. Thirty feet deep in the murky waters of Virginia's Elizabeth River, a scuba diver's body is discovered near the Inactive Naval Shipyard. As the police begin searching for clues, the wallet of investigative reporter Ted Eddings is found. Unnerved by the possible identity of the victim, Scarpetta orders the crime scene roped off and left alone until she arrives. What was he doing there, searching for Civil War relics as the officer suggested, or was there a bigger story? As she rifles through the multitude of clues, a second murder hits much closer to home. This new development puts Scarpetta and her colleagues hot on the trail of a military conspiracy. Filled with lurid details that Cornwell's legions of fans have come to expect, Cause of Death is a breathtaking mystery further enhanced by C. J. Critt's gripping narration. Cause of Death is the 7th book in the Kay Scarpetta series.
©1996 Patricia Daniels Cornwell (P)2002 Recorded Books, LLC
Blow Fly
Summary
The Twelfth Dr. Kay Scarpetta Novel Dr. Kay Scarpetta has left Virginia in search of peace but instead finds herself drawn into baffling, horrific murders in Florida, where she becomes entangled in an international conspiracy that confronts her with the shock of her life.
©2003 Cornwell Entertainment, Inc. (P)2015 HarperCollins Publishers
Point of Origin
Summary
This dazzling thriller pits Chief Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta against greater odds than ever before. Convicted serial killer Carrie Grethen has escaped from a psychiatric hospital with plans for revenge. Wary and shaken, Scarpetta also has to investigate the death by fire of an unknown woman. The post mortem reveals the woman was stabbed before the fire was started, and soon Scarpetta and her colleagues are called out to the scene of another fire and another murder. When her lover, Benton Wesley, disappears while following up a tip-off, Scarpetta, with sudden, appalling clarity, sees that Carrie has set up a scenario in which she has the upper hand and can manipulate them all.
©1998 Cornwell Enterpises, Inc. (P)2015 HarperCollins Publishers