Depraved Heart: A Scarpetta Novel (Kay Scarpetta)

#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...