Depraved Heart: A Scarpetta Novel

When a twenty-year-old video surfaces from Lucy Farinelli's computer containing footage that could have serious legal implications, her aunt and surrogate mother Dr. Kay Scarpetta finds herself unable to confide in either her FBI-profiler husband Benton Wesley or her investigative partner Pete Marino. The twenty-third Kay Scarpetta novel by Patricia Cornwell puts its protagonist in a forensic and personal bind: investigating a threat to someone she loves while cut off from the people who would ordinarily help her. The result is one of the series' most psychologically claustrophobic entries.

Susan Ericksen narrates with the layered anxiety the material requires, capturing Scarpetta's intelligence and her uncharacteristic uncertainty in equal measure. Her performance gives the novel's distinctive first-person close perspective its proper intimacy, and the forensic details that anchor the series come through with the precision Ericksen brings to all her Cornwell narration. The runtime is substantial at just under fifteen hours.