Her rise, her triumph, her tragic loss--only James Patterson can tell the full story of America's tragedy. In the early hours of Sunday, August 5, 1962, Marilyn Monroe's live-in housekeeper wakes with a sinking feeling. She knocks loudly at her employer's locked bedroom door, and when there is no answer, she calls Monroe's psychiatrist, Ralph Greenson.

Greenson breaks into Monroe's bedroom and finds a horrifying scene: the thirty-six-year-old movie star lying naked, lifeless, face down on her bed, still clutching the telephone receiver.

At 4:20 a.m., Greenson alerts the LAPD.

It is established protocol for the chief medical examiner to conduct celebrity autopsies, but inexplicably, junior medical examiner Dr. Thomas Noguchi performs the procedure on the five-four, 118-pound actress. When you are a coroner, Noguchi believes, you start from the assumption that every body you examine might be a murder victim. ? In those final summer days, did Marilyn Monroe have more enemies than friends?