Depraved Heart

Depraved Heart is a novel by the American writer Patricia Cornwell, published in 2015 and one of her long series about the forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta.

The clips are not random: they show somebody who has been watching Lucy for decades and who now wants to be understood, and they raise legal questions that make Scarpetta's position worse each time another one arrives. She is dealing with a suspicious death at the same time, and the investigation is complicated by the fact that she cannot share what she knows with the people she would normally trust, including her husband and her colleague. Cornwell writes the procedures in detail and keeps the tension inside Scarpetta's head, where the questions about her own family and about whoever is behind the messages are worked through in real time.

It is one of the later novels in the series, and its plot turns on evidence that can neither be used in court nor ignored, which is the position its heroine has spent a career avoiding.