Patricia Cornwell hits the ground running in DEPRAVED HEART, her latest Kay Scarpetta police procedural. The series cast of characters are all on hand with a few welcome additions.

Scarpetta’s niece Lucy's house is being ransacked by an over-zealous group of FBI agents who refuse to tell her what they are looking for. Lucy has her partner/wife Janet with her, along with the little boy, Desi, they hope to adopt. Pete Marino makes his presence known and is as prickly as ever. Benton Wesley is not at the house at the very beginning of the novel; he is in a helicopter following Scarpetta and Marino.

"DEPRAVED HEART is Patricia Cornwell at her best. She sprinkles in enough red herrings to satisfy those readers looking for clues, and ponders in Scarpetta’s mind what is really happening to her, her family and her close friends."

They are at the scene of a bloody homicide of the daughter of a powerful Hollywood producer, who is flying back to Massachusetts, ready to kill everyone (or, at the very least, sue them). The body has been removed to the morgue, thus an official identification of the corpse has not been made yet. The young lady was found nude, wrapped in a skimpy robe at the entrance to her home, with her head bashed in. Is she really the woman who owns the house and lives there?

We learn early on that Scarpetta was hit with a scuba diving spear, and the wound has left her with a limp; she needs to walk with a cane and is in great pain. She is positive that the person who shot her was Carrie Grethen, a sociopathic killer who at one time was Lucy's mentor at the FBI. Nobody believes Scarpetta because Carrie was supposedly killed in a helicopter crash years ago. But she sticks to her guns and does not back down from her identification.

As Scarpetta begins to work the death scene, she receives on her phone a link to a film that divulges secrets of Lucy from 20 years ago. This is followed up by others that isolate Scarpetta, which leaves her alone with dangerous thoughts she cannot share with anyone. She becomes confused and withdrawn as she tries to understand who possibly could have sent these links. The maniac had to be very close to Lucy and at the age that she was in the clips. Of course, her main suspect is none other than Carrie.

The story is told mostly from Scarpetta's point of view. The other characters speak, but it is Scarpetta who tells readers this riveting tale. Another important facet to the plot is the introduction of "data fiction": [which is] "what can happen if we're so reliant on technology that we become completely dependent on things we can't see. Therefore we can no longer judge for ourselves what's accurate... reality is defined by software."

DEPRAVED HEART is Patricia Cornwell at her best. She sprinkles in enough red herrings to satisfy those readers looking for clues, and ponders in Scarpetta’s mind what is really happening to her, her family and her close friends. This is one not to miss.