A character as strong as any in popular fiction, Scarpetta knows the world is evil and often overwhelming, but she continues to rail against it with all her endearing and humane self-righteousness, wrote the Wall Street Journal about Black Notice, the latest in a hot streak of number-one New York Times bestsellers by America's top crime novelist. Now Patricia Cornwell delivers a profoundly original novel that takes her readers deeper into Scarpetta's heart and soul than ever before.
We enter The Last Precinct through the reverberating aftershocks of Black Notice, inconceivably finding Virginia's Chief Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta an object of suspicion – and criminal investigation. And the nightmare perpetuated on Scarpetta's doorstep continues as she discovers that the so-called Werewolf murders may have extended to New York City and into the darkest corners of her past. When a formidable prosecutor, a female assistant district attorney from New York, is brought into the case, Scarpetta must struggle to make what she knows to be the truth prevail against mounting and unnerving evidence to the contrary. Tested in every way, she turns inward to ask, Where do you go when there is nowhere left? The answer is the Last Precinct. By the end of the novel, it is clear that Scarpetta's life can never be the same.
Woven through with extraordinary forensic detail, the larger-than-life presence of Scarpetta's niece Lucy and her colleague Captain Pete Marino, and a palpable sense of fear that keeps readers looking back – into the past for clues, and over their shoulders for the next enigmatic act of violence – The Last Precinct marks a new era for Kay Scarpetta and a triumphant achievement for Patricia Cornwell.
Patricia Cornwell's international bestsellers include Postmortem – the only novel to win the Edgar, Creasey, Anthony and Macavity awards and the French Prix du Roman d'Aventure in a single year – and Cruel and Unusual, which won Britain's prestigious Gold Dagger Award for the year's best crime novel in 1993. Her fictional chief medical examiner, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, won the 1999 Sherlock Award for best detective created by an American author. Cornwell divides her time between New York City and Richmond, Virginia, where she has helped establish the Virginia Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine, the first forensic training facility of its kind in the nation. Cornwell serves as the Institute's Chairman of the Board.
