Identity Unknown, Kay Scarpetta By Patricia Cornwell

Dr. Kay Scarpetta is summoned to a haunting scene at an abandoned theme park, where she must retrieve a body in a case that immediately becomes personal. The victim, Sal Giordano, is not just any man—he is someone Scarpetta shared a passionate love affair with during her early career in Rome, a connection that evolved into a lifelong friendship. The circumstances of his death are disturbing: his body is surrounded by a crop circle of petals, and his skin has an odd, unnatural redness. Scarpetta’s tech-savvy niece, Lucy, speculates that Giordano may have been dropped from an unidentified flying craft, fueling theories of alien involvement.

But Scarpetta, ever the pragmatist, turns to her trusted method of uncovering the truth: the autopsy. As she delves deeper into Giordano’s postmortem, she is shocked to find that the man she once loved may have left her a deliberate message through the details of his death. As investigators entertain ideas of extraterrestrial interference, Scarpetta finds herself facing a far darker and more sinister explanation—one that hits much closer to home, and in her view, far more terrifying. 📚❤️