Donn Cortez

As winter's hold deepens in the dark days of February, Miami's hotels fill to the bursting point. Cruise ships flock to the busiest port in the world as people desperate for warmer climates board these behemoths of the seas. People with too much time and money fill the clubs. In every other jurisdiction, as its citizens are driven indoors, there is a downturn in crime but not in Miami, as the members of the Miami-Dade Crime Lab can attest. Stretched to the breaking point, Lieutenant Caine is called to what appears to be a failed international terrorist a botched arms-for-Afghani-heroin exchange. The scene is littered with bodies and blood droplets identified as being from one Abdus Sattar Pathan. Once before, Pathan managed to escape being charged in the murder of a Federal agent. This time Caine has him. Except Pathan has an iron-clad he was miles away, on stage doing his magic act. Horatio is convinced that Pathan and the international terrorist known as the Hare are one and the same. Can Caine prove it before the Hare puts his deadly plan into motion?

Christmas in Miami‹the city is wrapped in its own unique festive cheer, and countless children breathlessly await the arrival of Santa Claus. Except this year there are hundreds of Santas. Miami has been invaded by the Red Menace. An annual gathering of hundreds of red-suited, jolly old fat men and women swarm over the city, comical and annoying, until one of them turns up dead. In what should be a time of goodwill to all the Miami-Dade Crime Lab finds that what appears to be the simplest of crimes hides darker motives. Who would want to kill Santa? Who would go to such lengths to conceal the identity of a victim that they would decapitate him and remove both his hands? And how does a simple convenience store robbery suddenly spiral into an international incident of kidnapping and murder?

A teenager is found dead in his motel room, the cause of death: millipede poison...Now crime scene investigator Gil Grissom must aid CSI's Nick Stokes and Riley Adams against a serial killer whose knowledge of entomology rivals his own -- a brutal murderer who is not only using insects as the tools of destruction, but actually modeling the attacks after their behavior.... In the meantime, CSIs Catherine Willows and Greg Sanders must investigate a bizarre death, where the victim had gotten mixed up with two very different groups of people -- one involved in using and dealing crystal meth, the other an avant-garde group of artists -- a collision of subcultures where everyone is a suspect and nothing is as it seems....

By air, sea, and land the members of the Miami-Dade Crime Lab are called out. In a field outside the Everglades a balloon has just set down; the lone man inside the basket is dead -- an apparent suicide. A yacht riddled with bullets limps into the Port of Miami; only a gravely wounded hijacker survives, confessing that there are drugs somewhere on board, but he can't find them. A local journalist, looking to break out of the rat race with a novel based on the people he covers on his beat, is found dead. In the yacht's galley is a record-setting sunfish that seems to be the key piece of evidence to just what was being smuggled on the ship, yet the lab is stumped when they discover no more than the normal parasites infesting the fish. A raunchy video of a citrus heiress having sex in a public place gives her the motive to kill the journalist-turned-novelist, but she has an alibi. All small pieces of the puzzles that Horatio Caine and the member of his team have to unravel to find out why all these people were killed. Before it is over the members of the Miami-Dade Crime Lab are caught up in an intrigue that reaches to the heart of Castro's Cuba.

A lavish penthouse party on top of a Vegas hotel and casino plays host to a bizarre set-up to murder in which a security guard is trapped and killed in a private elevator--and the body soon vanishes . . . leading crime scene investigators Nick Stokes and Greg Sanders straight to an uncanny circus troupe with deadly connections to none other than the Russian mafia. In the meantime, Ray Langston and Catherine Willows are called to a psychiatric facility where two patients have just escaped after attacking an orderly. One of the escaped patients, an Iraq war veteran, managed to smuggle in a military-grade nerve gas, inducing realistic and shared three-dimensional illusions and hallucinations . . . and Ray and Catherine must race against time in order to find two very dangerous individuals now roaming freely on the streets of Las Vegas. . . .

Lieutenant Horatio Caine of the Miami-Dade Crime Lab is called in to investigate a mysterious death at an organic eatery. He finds the victim, waiter Phillip Mulrooney, bent over a stainless steel toilet, his clothing shredded. There are burn marks on his face and cell phone fragments scattered around, and his shoes are blown off his feet. Incredible as it seems, the initial evidence points to death by lightning strike. The staff at The Earthly Garden believe Mulrooney's death is an act of God -- punishment for straying from the Vitality Method, their spiritual philosophy that inner beauty can be revealed by nurturing the physical and spiritual. The only philosophy Lieutenant Horatio Caine believes in is justice for the victim -- and he'll move heaven and earth to get it.

The Miami Dade Crime Lab is called in to examine the body of a young woman who has washed ashore on an island in Florida Bay. Lieutenant Horatio Caine is quick to identify the probable murder weapon: a shark dart used by the navy as part of an experimental program to kill enemy divers. However, during the autopsy, Doctor Alexx Woods finds that the true cause of death was drowning; the dart was used postmortem. When another mangled body of a woman is discovered, Caine begins to suspect the worst. The unusual and violent nature of the crimes bears all the hallmarks of an organized serial killer -- sexual predation, a great deal of preparation and a disturbingly distorted worldview. Now, the lieutenant and his team must race to piece together all the clues to stop the murderer before they can strike again.