In the world’s #1 bestselling crime writer comes the extraordinary new Kay Scarpetta novel.

It is the week before Christmas. A tanking overall economy has prompted Dr. Kay Scarpetta-despite her active schedule and her carrying on work as the senior forensic analyst for CNN- to provide her providers pro bono to NY City’s Workplace of the Chief Medical Examiner. In no time at all, her increased presence seems to precipitate a string of unforeseen and unsettling occasions. She is asked go on the environment about The Scarpetta Factor: Scarpetta (Reserve 17) about the sensational case of Hannah Starr, that has vanished and is presumed useless. Moments later during the same telecast, she receives a startling call-in from a previous psychiatric patient of Benton Wesley’s. When she returns after the display to the house where she and Benton live, she discovers an ominous package-possibly a bomb-waiting on her behalf at the front end desk. Shortly the apparent danger on Scarpetta’s life finds her embroiled in a surreal plot that includes a famous actor accused of an unthinkable sex crime as well as the disappearance of a beautiful millionairess with whom Lucy appears to have shared a secret past.

Scarpetta’s CNN producer wants her to launch a TV show called The Scarpetta Element. Provided the bizarre occasions currently in play, she concerns that her developing fame will create the illusion that she’s a ‘special element,’ a mythical capability to solve all her instances. She miracles if she will end up like other Television personalities: her own stereotype.

The Scarpetta Factor, the seventeenth in the series, discovers the familiar cast of people together once again in New York. Marino is doing work for the NYPD; Benton Wesley uses his forensic psycho­logical knowledge at Kirby and Bellevue; and Lucy continues to dazzle with her experience in forensic pc investigations as she works just one more case with NY prosecutor Jaime Berger.

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