"Identity Unknown" by Patricia Cornwell

An audio book.

Kay Scarpetta (her first-person PoV) is a coroner. Kay has an Irish secretary and a husband, Ben. Elvin, the person Kay replaced, wasn't trustworthy. Her colleague Merino is. A girl, mentally impaired, has died from a gunshot - self-inflicted say the parents, owners of a theme park. They try to get her daughter's body back. But there are suspicious bruises. The body of Sal Giordano (Nobel astrophysicist, SETI sympathiser, close friend of Kay) is found in the park on his 60th birthday, dropped from the sky by a non-identifiable type of craft. The FBI suspect he might be a traitor. Lucy, her neice, is in intelligence and she's a helicopter pilot. Carrie was a colleague - a psychopath. She went to Moscow as the result of a prisoner exchange. Giordano might have been alive when he fell, but why didn't a big cat (found loose in the area) eat him?

Kay does Giordano's post-mortem in a secret lab in case he has UFO-related infection. When she visited him on his last day she'd been preceded by a florist delivering a booby-trapped vase. The same type of van is being used by a firm working on her building. He'd left his house afterwards with a case and $35k in cash.

A helicopter crashes into the sea. A TV reporter who'd criticised the girl's parents, had been scheduled to be in it. Imitation moon dust is found on the girl's body and Giordano's.

Carrie (who used to be Lucy's lover) contacts Kay via video link. She admits to the florist job, helicopter sabotage, etc. She shows a video of the daughter's last moments. Her location's tracked (Warsaw) and she's arrested. The parents are arrested. Kay and Merino visit a research lab that Giordano had been visiting. They'd been manufacturing moon/mars dust for sale to NASA etc. Giordano was interested in using it to develop radio telescopes. He'd been bribing a worker there. Carrie had worked there as a pilot. Her vehicle had anti-radar treatment. The research lab's owned by the parents. Keri did extra work for them.

Other reviews

• seattlebookmama (two of Cornwell’s old standbys, ones that I’d be happy to see her retire, appear. First, she has to be driven to the scene in a helicopter, but oh no, there’s a storm coming. I was irritated. Can Kay not go anywhere without there being a storm? Just once? Please? And then something has to be retrieved by diving, which harks back to an earlier book)
• Elaine Donadio (The killers’ motives are not clearly defined. I don’t find the motivations plausible. Too extreme a reaction for such insignificant provocation. The pacing is good. Modern technology and concerns with extra-terrestrials dominate the book demonstrating the author’s attempt to keep up with current trends. All in all, a tightly knit plot with some ridiculous characters, but still a page turner.)