Cruel and Unusual

At 11.05 one December evening in Richmond, Virginia, convicted murderer Ronnie Joe Waddell is pronounced dead in the electric chair.

At the morgue Dr Kay Scarpetta waits for Waddell's body. Preparing to perform a post mortem before the subject is dead is a strange feeling, but Scarpetta has been here before. And Waddell's death is not the only newsworthy event on this freezing night: the grotesquely wounded body of a young boy is found propped against a rubbish skip. To Scarpetta the two cases seem unrelated, until she recalls that the body of Waddell's victim had been arranged in a strikingly similar position.

Then a third murder is discovered, the most puzzling of all. The crime scene yields very few clues: old blood stains, fragments of feather, and - most baffling - a bloody fingerprint that points to the one suspect who could not possibly have committed this murder.