The teasing psychological clues lead Scarpetta and her team—Pete Marino, Benton Wesley, and Lucy Farinelli—to suspect that they are hunting someone with a cunning and malevolent mind whose secrets have kept them in the shadows, until now.

Cornwell was considered courageous by some reviewers [1] for setting the characters of this novel at a major crossroads.

Mutual trusts have been eroded over previous books and the group lacks the cohesion it had earlier in the series.

This device not only allows for more characters and their perspectives to come to the fore, but also marks a significant transformation in the way that the novels represent the criminal.

Whereas previously the criminal's mind was never made available to the reader—thus intensifying their "otherness"—the later novels allow space to explore their point of view and uncover their motivations.