Red Mist (Paperback or Softback)

Scarpetta, an all-new Original Series, is out now on Prime Video!

Enter the chilling and captivating world of Dr. Kay Scarpetta before Nicole Kidman and Jamie Lee Curtis bring the mystery to life onscreen.

“The new audience will be compelled by the characters, crimes, and mysteries that are the trifecta of Patricia’s masterful storytelling… and a warning……there WILL be BLOOD.” —Jamie Lee Curtis

Dr. Kay Scarpetta’s investigation leads her into a terrifying terrain of conspiracy and potential terrorism on an international scale in this red-hot thriller from #1 New York Times bestselling author Patricia Cornwell.

On her quest to find out exactly what happened to her former deputy chief, Jack Fielding, murdered six months before, Dr. Kay Scarpetta drives to the Georgia Prison for Women to meet a convicted sex offender and the mother of a vicious and diabolically brilliant killer. Against the advice of her FBI criminal agent husband, Benton Wesley, Scarpetta is determined to hear this woman out.

The quest is personal, but also professional. As the director of the new Cambridge Forensic Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and with her connection to the Department of Defense, Scarpetta has urgent reasons to learn more about a string of grisly killings that she feels are somehow linked to Fielding’s death. The murder of a Savannah family years earlier, a young woman on death row, and then other explicable deaths that begin to occur at a breathtaking pace—all of these are related, but who is behind them, and why?

Driven by inner forces, 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. . . .

And she’s the only one who can stop it.

Patricia Cornwell is one of the world’s major internationally bestselling authors, translated into thirty-six languages in more than 120 countries. She is a founder of the Virginia Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine; a founding member of the National Forensic Academy; a member of the Advisory Board for the Forensic Sciences Training Program at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, New York City; and a member of the Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital’s National Council, where she is an advocate for psychiatric research. In 2008, Cornwell won the Galaxy British Book Awards’ Books Direct Crime Thriller of the Year—the first American to win this prestigious award. In 2011, she was awarded the Medal of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the Ministry of Culture in Paris. Her earlier works include Postmortem—the only novel to win five major crime awards in a single year—and Cruel & Unusual, which won Britain’s Gold Dagger Award for best crime novel of 1993. Dr. Kay Scarpetta herself won the 1999 Sherlock Award for the best detective created by an American author.