Depraved Heart by Patricia Cornwell was a solid, steady crime novel.

This is the 23rd book in this series, and of course it's the first one I read. Believe me, that doesn't help AT ALL. Not knowing a lot of the background about these characters and their situations didn't help my understanding of the relationships between these characters when reading this book through. While it didn't ruin the entire book for me, I think it somewhat ruined the experience. Why is the bad guy, well, the bad guy? Why do certain people not like each other? Patricia tries her very best to give as much background as possible in short bits, but it just wasn't enough.

Besides that issue, this book was really good! I love a good crime thriller - like Kathy Reichs, Patricia Cornwell has her own style and it's fantastic! It's a splash of mystery, some R rated scenes, and some solid character development along the way.

This book seems like it spans a long time, but in reality I think it's only a day or two. I don't even think it goes into the night! So this entire plot involving a dead body and "finding" the killer happened in under 24 hours?! It might not be believable, but it somehow worked. I didn't even notice it was only one day until I looked back over the story and some of the other reviews. I would like to see that expanded on - maybe make the books over a couple days, at the very least? But that's just my opinion.

Overall, I liked this book. I definitely would like to start from the beginning and work through all 23+ books, but I doubt I'll be able to find them all (or find the time. My goodness, summer is already over when I wrote this review?!). Gritty crime stories like these always make my days more interesting - some days I love an ooey, gooey, guilty pleasure romance and other days I want an R rated crime/thriller or horror to take up my time.

Three out of five stars.


I received this book for free through Goodreads First Reads.