From Potter's Field

Christmas has never been a particularly good time for Dr Kay Scarpetta. Although a holiday for most, the festivities always seem to heighten the alienation felt by society's violent fringe, and that usually means more work for Scarpetta, Virginia's Chief Medical Examiner and consulting forensic pathologist for the FBI.

The body was naked, female, and found propped against a fountain in a bleak area of New York's Central Park. Her apparent manner of death — the gunshot wound to the head, the sections of skin excised from the body, and the displayed corpse — points to a chilling modus operandi that suggests Temple Brooks Gault, Scarpetta's nemesis, is back at work.

Calling on all her reserves of courage and skill, and with the able assistance of colleagues Marino and Wesley, Scarpetta must track this most dangerous of killers in pursuit of survival as well as justice — heading inexorably to an electrifying climax amid the dark, menacing labyrinths of the New York subway.