Port Mortuary (#18) Patricia Cornwell

In Port Mortuary, Patricia Cornwell brings Scarpetta together with Marino, Benton and Lucy in the intimate way her fans loved in the early novels, and we welcome a voice we haven't heard in years. The point of view is Scarpetta's and this is her story.

Port Mortuary, the title of Patricia Cornwell's dazzling, fast-pasted eighteenth Scarpetta novel is literally a port for the dead-and the deaths are mounting as a treacherous path from Scarpetta's past merges with the high-tech highway on which she now finds herself. At the beginning of her professional career, when; she accepted a scholarship from the Air Force to pay off her medical school debt, Scarpetta found herself ensnared in a gruesome case of what seemed to be vicious, racially motivated hate crimes against two Americans in South Africa. Now, later, her secret military ties have drawer to Denver Air Force Base, where she has been immersed in a training fellowship to master the art of CT-assisted virtual autopsy-a procedure the White House has mandated that she introduce into the private sector. 

As the chief of the new Cambridge Forensic Center in Massachusetts, a join venture of the Center in Massachusetts, a join venture of the state and federal governments and MIT, and Harvard, Scarpetta is confronted with a case that could shut down her new facility and ruin her personally and professionally. A young man drops dead, apparently for a cardiac arrhythmia, eerily close to Scarpetta's new Cambridge home, but when his body is examined the morning, there are stunning indications that he may have been alive when he was zipped inside the pouch and locked inside the Center cooler.