Dr. Samantha Owens was just starting to cope with a personal tragedy when the dead man asked her to solve his murder. Hesitant to oblige a dead man's letter when she learns that case was labeled a suicide and promptly closed, forensic pathologist Dr. Samantha Owens unravels a decades-old mystery involving murder and a kidnapped child.

Boston medical examiner Maura Isles's SUV stalls on a mountain road, leaving her and her friends to seek refuge in the seemingly abandoned village called Kingdom Come, but when Boston homicide detective Jane Rizzoli receives word that Maura's charred body was discovered in a ravine, she sets out to hunt down the killer and unravel the secrets concerning Maura's fate.

In the quiet of twilight, on an early autumn day, twenty-six-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...