Unnatural Death

In this 27th installment of Cornwell’s “Kay Scarpetta” series (following Livid), Virginia Chief Medical Examiner Kay is called to a remote wilderness campsite to retrieve the mutilated bodies of two campers. An enormous footprint is found near one of the bodies, catching the interest of investigator Pete Marino, a Bigfoot enthusiast. The bodies belong to Huck and Brittany Manson, whom the FBI suspects of spying for either Russia or China. Their top-secret autopsies are performed in a trailer with a remote feed, allowing agents to watch while Scarpetta describes the procedures and her findings. When Scarpetta finds a microchip embedded in Brittany’s body, she suspects that the couple were savagely slashed to death in an attempt to retrieve the chip. Award-winning narrator January LaVoy returns to the series, ably capturing the tense atmosphere and fleshing out the characters with shifts in tone and pitch—for example, seamlessly differentiating between Scarpetta’s “serious business” speech pattern and her niece Lucy’s irreverent tone as she brings Scarpetta to the crime scene.