•
Kay Scarpetta - chief medical examiner. •
Benton Wesley - FBI profiler. "He was FBI right down to his
Florsheim shoes, a sharp featured man with prematurely silver hair suggesting a mellow disposition that wasn't there. He was lean and hard and looked like a trial lawyer in his precisely tailored khaki suit and blue silk paisley-printed tie. I couldn't recall ever seeing him in a shirt that wasn't white and lightly starched. He had a master's degree in psychology and had been a high school principal in Dallas before enlisting in the Bureau, where he worked first as a field agent, then undercover in fingering members of the Mafia, before ending up where he'd started, in a sense." •
Dorothy Farinelli - Kay's sister and mother of Lucy that lives in Miami. Her current boyfriend is Ralph and previously she was with Andy, who has a pawn shop. Then she flies to Nevada to marry Jacob Blank. Kay says "my sister should never have been a mother. My sister should never have been Italian." •
Lucy Farinelli - Kay's 10-year-old niece. Described as "a genius, an impossible little holy terror of enigmatic Latin descent whose father died when she was small. She had no one but my only sister, Dorothy, who was too caught up in writing children's books to worry much about her flesh-and-blood daughter." •
Pete Marino - detective sergeant in the Richmond Police Department. Described as "pushing fifty, with a face life had chewed on, and long wisps of greying hair parted low on one side and combed over his balding pate. At least six feet tall, he was bay-windowed from decades of bourbon or beer." •
Norman Tanner - director of Public Safety •
Abby Turnbull - reporter who obtains an inside information on the murders. •
Alvin Amburgey - The county commissioner and Kay's boss. He's from North Carolina and he previously worked in Sacramento, California. •
Bill Boltz - The Commonwealth's attorney. He has a semi-secret relationship with Kay Scarpetta. He enjoys playing tennis. •
Spiro Fortosis - professor of Criminal Psychiatry at University of Virginia. He and Kay know each other from the start of Kay's career. •
Matt Petersen - Lori Petersen's husband. He attended Harvard University as an undergraduate, now he attends university in Charlottesville for a PhD in American Literature; he's also an actor who is playing in
Amleto by
William Shakespeare, and he's writing a dissertation about
Tennessee Williams. •
Roy McCorkle - aka
Mr. Nobody; the serial killer, obtaining the information of the dead women through his job as a hotline operator
Victims •
Brenda Steppe, a teacher at Quinton Elementary. She was from Georgia and she was Baptist. She was also a musician. •
Patty Lewis, a writer who came from a rich family in the Shenandoah Valley •
Cecile Tyler, receptionist in a financial society •
Lori Anne Petersen, a surgeon who wanted to specialize in plastic surgery; she worked at VMC (Virginian Medical Center). She attended Brown College and then Harvard Medical School. Her family lives in Philadelphia. •
Henna Yarborough - sister of Abby Turnbull. She was a professor at the School of Broadcasting. She was from North Carolina, and her ex-husband lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. ==Literary significance and criticism==