Three individuals--forty-two-year-old Deputy Chief Virginia West, Police Chief Judy Hammer, and twenty-two-year-old journalist Andy Brazil--search for a serial killer, exploring the seedy underbelly of Charlotte, North Carolina, while trudging through their own personal struggles, from unhappy marriages to obsessions with their jobs.

"In Southern Cross, Cornwell takes us close to the sometimes zany (but always threatening) experiences of big-city police, in a story of corruption, scandal, and robberies that escalate to murder. The setting is Richmond, Virginia, where former Charlotte police chief Judy Hammer has been brought, by an NIJ grant, to clean up the police force. Reeling from the recent death of her husband, and resented by the Richmond police force, city manager, and...

Patricia Cornwell has a sixth sense about the men and women in blue. In Hornet's Nest, her page-turning novel about crime and police in Charlotte, North Carolina, Cornwell moved behind the badges of these real-life heroes to uncover flesh-and-blood characters who strode through her pages to reveal vulnerable, passionate, brave, sometimes doubting, always fascinating figures.
In Southern Cross, Cornwell takes us even closer...