Port Mortuary

About Port Mortuary

The world’s bestselling crime writer Patricia Cornwell presents the extraordinary eighteenth novel in the Kay Scarpetta series, in which Kay Scarpetta is confronted with a case that could ruin her professionally and personally.

Kay Scarpetta has been training at the Dover Port Mortuary, mastering the art of ‘virtual autopsy’ – a groundbreaking procedure that could soon revolutionise forensic science. And it is not too long before these new skills urgently need to be put into practice. A young man drops dead, apparently from a heart condition, eerily close to Scarpetta’s home. But when his body is examined the next morning, there are stunning indications that he may have been alive when he was zipped inside a pouch and locked in the cooler.

When the revolutionary 3D radiology scans reveal more shocking details about internal injuries unlike any Scarpetta has ever seen, she realizes that this is a case of murder – and that she is fighting a cunning and uniquely cruel enemy. Now it is a race against time to discover who and why before more people die. But that time is running out . . .

About Port Mortuary

The new Kay Scarpetta novel from the world’s #1 bestselling crime writer.

“When it comes to the forensic sciences, nobody can touch Cornwell.”
–The New York Times Book Review

Port Mortuary, the title of Patricia Cornwell’s eighteenth Scarpetta novel, is literally a port for the dead. In this fast-paced story, a treacherous path from Scarpetta’s past merges with the high- tech highway she now finds herself on. We travel back to the beginning of her professional career, when she accepted a scholarship from the Air Force to pay off her medical school debt. Now, more than twenty years and many career successes later, her secret military ties have drawn her to Dover Air Force Base, where she has been immersed in a training fellowship.

As the chief of the new Cambridge Forensic Center in Massachusetts, a joint venture of the state and federal governments, MIT and Harvard, Scarpetta is confronted with a case that could shut down her new facility and ruin her personally and professionally.

About Port Mortuary

The new Kay Scarpetta novel from the world’s #1 bestselling crime writer.

“When it comes to the forensic sciences, nobody can touch Cornwell.”
–The New York Times Book Review

Port Mortuary, the title of Patricia Cornwell’s eighteenth Scarpetta novel, is literally a port for the dead. In this fast-paced story, a treacherous path from Scarpetta’s past merges with the high- tech highway she now finds herself on. We travel back to the beginning of her professional career, when she accepted a scholarship from the Air Force to pay off her medical school debt. Now, more than twenty years and many career successes later, her secret military ties have drawn her to Dover Air Force Base, where she has been immersed in a training fellowship.

As the chief of the new Cambridge Forensic Center in Massachusetts, a joint venture of the state and federal governments, MIT and Harvard, Scarpetta is confronted with a case that could shut down her new facility and ruin her personally and professionally.