What’s important, though, is not that we’re intellectually challenged to figure out a series of grisly domestic who-dunnits, but that we’re forced, living inside Kay Scarpetta’s first-person voice, to feel a noose that’s tightening with cruelties from the present, the future and especially from her own past.

Yes, in Scarpetta terms, the gang’s all here. But as they do so often in Cornwell’s books, they’re running from their own demons and/or chasing their own pipe dreams. Kay sees what she sees during those long, detailed autopsies of the seemingly unrelated victims. And it’s pointing her in a direction that puts her at odds with everything and, at times, everybody she knows and loves.