In the summer of 1992, Arkansas governor Bill Clinton and Tennessee senator Albert Gore begin their long-shot campaign to win the White House. On a sweltering hillside in Knoxville, Dr. Bill Brockton, the bright, ambitious young head of the University of Tennessee's Anthropology Department, launches an unusual -- some would call it macabre -- research facility, unlike any other in existence. Brockton is determined to revolutionize the study of forensics...

A frozen corpse found in a lake near the Oak Ridge, Tenn., nuclear research facility turns out to be that of Dr. Leonard Novak, one of the leaders of the Manhattan Project. When the source of death, potent radioactive material the old man somehow ingested, poisons the local medical examiner, forensic anthropologist Dr. Bill Brockton suspects a link between the present-day murder and long-forgotten events.

While helping excavate a newly discovered chamber beneath the Palace of the Popes in Avignon, France, Miranda Lovelady, Dr. Bill Brockton's protege, makes a discovery that triggers a deadly tug of war between the anthropologists, the Vatican, and a maniacal religious zealot.

Called in to identify some remains, Dr. Brockton finds his life plunged into chaos when his identification is called into question, a killer from his past returns, and his wife delivers some news that changes everything.

The onset of summer brings steamy weather to East Tennessee and the Body Farm, Dr. Bill Brockton's human-decomposition research facility at the University of Tennessee. But even Brockton is about to get more heat than he's bargained for when a former student asks him to help prove that her sister's death was not suicide, but murder.Brockton's quick consulting trip takes a long, harrowing detour to the Florida panhandle and the ruins of the North Florida...

In 1978, 56-year-old Leoma Patterson left a bar in Clinton, Tennessee, and was never seen again. Six months later, a female skeleton was found on a wooded lakeshore in a neighboring county. The bones were consistent with those of the missing woman, and one of Patterson's daughters recognized a ring found at the death scene as her mother's. The bones were buried, and six years later, a relative of Patterson's-- one of the men she was last seen alive...