A new, non-partisan, non-profit newsroom producing journalism in the public interest will launch here in January under the name ProPublica. Paul E. Steiger, former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, will serve as president and editor in chief. ProPublica, when fully staffed in 2008, will include 24 fulltime reporters and editors, the largest staff in American journalism devoted solely to investigative reporting. ProPublica will be supported entirely by philanthropy and will provide the articles it produces, free of charge, both through its own Web site and to leading news organizations selected with an eye toward maximizing the impact of each article.

When the story opens, Scarpetta and Wesley are “[i]nside the virtual-reality theater [with] twelve of Italy’s most powerful law enforcers and politicians, whose names, in the main, forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta… and forensic psychologist Benton Wesley both… the only non-Italians” [in the room]. Both are… consultants for the International Investigative Response (IIR), a special branch of the European Network of Forensic Science Institutes (ENFSI). They are there because the Italian government is in a very delicate position.

After living as a hermit in a forest cabin for 11 years, Nathan Zuckerman, now 71, must head to New York for surgery. A shadow of his hungrily virile, robust self, he is now unable to control his urine flow. Driven to restore some of his once-mighty phallus’s dignity, he seeks out prostate surgery. He is worn and tired; these early descriptions of his life in the cabin and the surgery are at once suavely comic and tenderly sad, while still preserving the nobility of his solitude.