Depraved Heart

October 5, 2015
In bestseller Cornwell's stirring 23rd novel starring Dr. Kay Scarpetta (after 2014's Flesh and Bone), what at first appears to be an accident quickly turns to murder once Scarpetta determines that Chanel Gilbert, the grown daughter of Hollywood producer Amanda Gilbert, didn't simply fall while trying to change a light bulb in the historic house Amanda owned near the Harvard campus in Cambridge, Mass. Meanwhile, Scarpetta receives a mysterious text, seemingly from the cell of her technical entrepreneur niece, Lucy Farinelli, with a video link showing Lucy's FBI dorm room almost 20 years earlier. It's a surveillance camera clearly planted by Carrie Grethen, Scarpetta's archenemy, who was Lucy's one-time mentor and lover, and now sociopath Carrie is sending potentially incriminating video to Scarpetta at the same time Lucy's nearby house is being raided by the FBI. Scarpetta's current case, Lucy's troubles with the Feds, and Carrie's spooky blast from the past are all on an inevitable collision course, and Cornwell shows surprising restraint in reining in her plot and keeping it tightly focused on her well-developed core characters. Agent: Esther Newberg, ICM.

October 1, 2015
Another gritty, world-weary tale of mayhem by masterful mysterian Cornwell (Flesh and Blood, 2014, etc.).Dr. Kay Scarpetta, fussy and exacting, doesn't mind gore. "A select few of us," she says, "come into this world not bothered by gruesomeness. In fact we're drawn to it, fascinated, intrigued, and it's a good thing." Say what you will about her, Dr. Kay, forensic pathologist extraordinaire, doesn't lead a dull life, even though much of her time is spent holding one-sided conversations with dead people. In the latest imposition on her good nature, a video lands on her phone while she's combing through an icky scene, a young woman whose "once slender body [is] in the early stages of putrefaction, bloated with areas of her skin slipping." That's grody to the max, to be sure, but, there being no accidents and no coincidences in this strange world of ours, it stands to reason that somehow Dr. Kay's latest examinee is bound up somehow with her niece, the subject of said video, a techie with a thick wallet and mad skills of a sort that Lisbeth Salander might envy. That road, with detours to the Bermuda Triangle ("you draw a line from Miami to San Juan, Puerto Rico to Bermuda"), is a bumpy one, and it passes right by the door of a mysterious, permanently peeved psycho. Or maybe not. Got all that? Well, let Dr. Kay summarize: "If Carrie knew Chanel and Chanel knew Lucy then that links the three of them. Chanel has been murdered. Carrie's existence can't be proven. That leaves Lucy hung out to dry by the FBI." Stir phony IRS agents and wisecracking Boston cops and a few red herrings into the mix, and you've got the makings of a real puzzler. Suffice it to say that there's enough familial psychodrama here to fuel a couple of dozen episodes of Dr. Phil and that the NRA won't like its product-placement moment.A trademark Cornwell mystery: terse and tangled, messy and body fluid-y, and altogether satisfying.

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October 15, 2015
At a crime scene, medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta gets a text from her niece Lucy's emergency number. Scarpetta breaks protocol and checks it out. But it's not from Lucy. The text links to a video of her niece, apparently filmed nearly two decades earlier and seeminglythis chills Scarpetta to the boneshot by Carrie Grethen. Series fans will remember Grethen, the deeply psychotic woman who was at one time Lucy's mentor and lover (and who appeared as a major antagonist in a few previous novels in the series). Is the video, which was clearly filmed without Lucy's knowledge, a threat of some sort? Did Grethen put in motion, many years earlier, a plan that is only now coming to its culmination? Kay has a potentially high-profile case on her handsthe daughter of a Hollywood bigwig has died under suspicious circumstancesbut can she focus on it when her niece's life might be in danger? Dark and cleverly plotted, the latest Scarpetta novel should definitely appeal to loyal series fans. Newcomers might want to check out the backlist first to bone up on Kay, Lucy, and Carrie's rather complicated history. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Cornwell's track record assures demand for her latest Scarpetta novel wherever books are sought.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)