After working one of the worst mass killings in U.S. history, Chief Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta returns home to recover, but an unsettling call drives her straight back to work.The body of a young woman has been discovered inside the gates of MIT, fraped in an unusual cloth and posed in a way that is too deliberate to be the killer’s first strike. A preliminary examination reveals that the body is covered in a fine dust that under ultra-violet light fluoresces blood-red, emerald-green and sapphire-blue, and physical evidence links this to another series of disturbing homicides in Washington, DC.As she pieces together the fragments of evidence Scarpetta and her team are drawn deeper into the dark world of designer drugs, drone technology, organised crime, and shocking corruption at the highest level.