Dr. Alexandra Blake's new job puts her at the forefront of her industry. As a geneticist at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, D.C., Alex is charged with finding a vaccine against bioterrorism. But the institute's new director, bitter over losing a bid to head the FBI, decides to refocus the institute toward crime solving. Soon Alex is forced to put her research on hold and cover forensics on a gruesome series of murders. Across the country, women near military bases are turning up dead, their corpses covered in strange tattoos. The more Alex studies the case, the more disturbing questions she has about the killer's motives. And when a new headline-making murder strikes particularly close to home, suddenly everyone around Alex—her boss, the Feds, even her congressman boyfriend—becomes suspect. Now it's up to her to succeed where forensics fail, and Alex will risk everything to trace the enemy…or die trying.

When a John Doe with a bayonet wound in his chest is discovered in a Washington, D.C. alley, geneticist Dr. Alexandra Blake of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology is pulled away from her bioterrorism work to aid in the investigation. Just a little digging reveals a corpse that's not at all that of the homeless robbery victim it was set up to resemble—-and Alex and her colleagues find themselves wrapped up in a complicated mystery of high-stakes international financial intrigue. The homicide investigation is just heating up when a political firestorm erupts over the AFIP's possession of human skulls brought back from Vietnam thirty years earlier by American servicemen. Alex is handed the delicate task of managing the restoration and return of these grisly souvenirs. Even the President of the United States has become involved, with the actual exchange scheduled to take place at a White House ceremony. Alex knows it's an important job—-her father was a soldier killed in Vietnam, so she of all people is sensitive to the issues surrounding the war—-but to her it still seems like an outsized uproar over something that happened long ago. But the skulls take on much more urgent significance when she uncovers evidence of a much bigger crime, and suddenly Alex discovers she's a target and the White House itself is under fire. The Silent Assassin is a tour-de-force thriller combining the intricate details of forensic science with the dark side of Washington politics and one of the freshest and most original characters in crime fiction today.

One bizarre death is just that—-a death. Two? Could be a coincidence. But in Lori Andrews’s latest thriller, geneticist Dr. Alexandra Blake discovers something much more dangerous than a killer—-an epidemic. Taking a break from decoding the genetic sequence of a tropical disease, Alex takes on an investigation into the gruesome and unexplained death of a DEA agent on a mob stakeout in New Mexico. Within hours, she uncovers similar deaths throughout the Southwest. Is it a naturally occurring epidemic or has a lethal bioweapon been released in the United States? With the nation’s attention focused on a provocative presidential race, Alex’s attempts to warn Homeland Security fail. Only with the help of a rogue DEA agent and a cutting-edge supercomputer will she and the rest of her team at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology stand a chance of putting an end to the devastation before public hysteria rages out of control. From Alex’s lab to the closed rooms of a killer’s mind, Immunity maps the perfect sequence for an infectious, edge-of-your-seat thriller.