Depraved Heart: A Scarpetta Novel (Paperback or Softback)

#1 New York Times bestselling author Patricia
Cornwell’s 23^rd Scarpetta novel is a “heart-stopping,
paranoia-fueled, propulsively readable, viscerally suspenseful, disconcertingly
shifty”* thriller in which Kay must save her niece from a diabolical set-up.

*Providence Journal

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 not knowing where to turn. She can’t
tell her FBI husband, Benton Wesley, or her investigative partner, Pete Marino.
Not even Lucy.

Soon Scarpetta is launched 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 more videos from the past
that threaten to destroy her entire world and everyone she loves. And when the
FBI raid Lucy’s estate and begin building a case that could send her to prison
for the rest of her life, there’s only one person who can save her...

Patricia Cornwell is recognized as one of the world’s top bestselling crime authors with novels translated into thirty-six languages in more than 120 countries. Her novels have won numerous prestigious awards including the Edgar, the Creasey, the Anthony, the Macavity, and the Prix du Roman d’Aventure. Beyond the Scarpetta series, Patricia has written a definitive book about Jack the Ripper, a biography, and three more fiction series among others. Cornwell, a licensed helicopter pilot and scuba diver, actively researches the forensic technologies that inform her work. She was born in Miami, grew up in Montreat, North Carolina, and now lives and works in Boston.