Depraved Heart (Kay Scarpetta, #23)

by Patricia Cornwell

No. 1 New York Times bestselling author Patricia Cornwell delivers the twenty-third engrossing thriller in her high-stakes series starring medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta.

Dr. Kay Scarpetta is working a suspicious death scene in Cambridge, Massachusetts when an emergency alert sounds on her phone. A video link lands in her text messages and seems to be from her computer genius niece Lucy. But how can it be? It’s clearly a surveillance film of Lucy taken almost twenty years ago.

As Scarpetta watches she begins to learn frightening secrets about her niece, whom she has loved and raised like a daughter. That film clip and then others sent soon after raise dangerous legal implications that increasingly isolate Scarpetta and leave her confused, worried, and not knowing where to turn. She doesn’t know whom she can tell – not her FBI husband Benton Wesley or her investigative partner Pete Marino. Not even Lucy.

In this new novel, Cornwell launches these unforgettable characters on an intensely psychological odyssey that includes the mysterious death of a Hollywood mogul’s daughter, aircraft wreckage on the bottom of the sea in the Bermuda Triangle, a grisly gift left in the back of a crime scene truck, and videos from the past that threaten to destroy Scarpetta’s entire world and everyone she loves. The diabolical presence behind what unfolds seems obvious – but strangely, not to the FBI. Certainly that’s the message they send when they raid Lucy’s estate and begin building a case that could send her to prison for the rest of her life.

In the latest novel in her bestselling series featuring chief medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta, Cornwell will captivate readers with the shocking twists, high-wire tension, and cutting-edge forensic detail that she is famous for, proving yet again why she’s the world’s #1 bestselling crime writer.

• ISBN13: 9780007552467
• Publish Date: 22 October 2015
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 14 May 2021
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Imprint: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 480
• Language: English
• URL: http://harpercollins.co.uk

Reviews

[EBookObsessed]

I was given this book for review but it is hard for me to give it a fair rating since this was book #23 of the series. There was a murder to be investigated and which was interesting. The plot twist at the end was explosive. But there was also a plotting which involved an old nemesis and whether the main character and her family were still in danger, was this person still plotting against them, and manipulating their lives.

Although I could follow the story, I did not know the interactions of the characters involved to be really drawn into it. With what was happening, the main character felt very distant from her adopted daughter and from her husband. This left me feeling do we trust them/do we care, since I am not more familiar with the family dynamics.

This was definitely a book for someone familiar with the series and not a stand alone book.