Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Live To Tell



Live To Tell

 

By Lisa Gardner

 

Published By: Bantam

 

Published On: July 13, 2010




Rating 4 out of 5 Stars






This is the Fourth Novel in the DD Warren Series. I must say this was one of those mind game psycho thrillers (which I love)
The only compliant I have before I get into my review is I'm not sure if I am really like D.D. Warren very much. This is the second book in a row where she gets an idea in her head of who committed the crime, and then send the whole book and squad to prove her wrong….and she will not let anyone change her mind about it. It is frustrating and I found myself yelling at my cd player in my car because of this ( I have issues)

So… the book starts off by paging D.D. Warren out of a date, which she was hoping to get down and dirty since it has been forever since she has had any action with a gentleman caller. Warren come upon a very disturbing scene. A whole family murdered; the entire family, the wife, three children and by the looks of it by their father before he went and shot himself in the head.  Then the next night another family murdered. This also looks like a murder suicide caused by the father.
D.D.'s new partner, Phil, has a shadow, Alex, a former agent turned professor at the Academy. Of course D.D. compares him to a George Clooney look alike and he soon become her shadow and partner throughout the book. I also sense some romance building up between them throughout the book.

We soon learn that this book focus mainly on mental illness in children and the main scene is the pediatric care unit at the hospital, which has a lock down psych unit where these disturbed children are. We soon met Danielle. She is a pediatric nurse at the facility, who herself was a lone survivor of a massacre caused by her father. She witnessed her father kill her WHOLE family and then shot himself in the head in her bedroom, leaving her a sole survivor of the ordeal.  Now the the 25th anniversary only two days away, Danielle finds herself losing it. Drinking more, hearing her dead father's voice in her said singing " oh Danny girl, my pretty pretty Danny girl". So when Detective Warren shows up at the facility, Danielle's immediate thinks "it has happened again" Of course Ms. Warren already is thinking Danielle is the person killing off these family's but she is unable to prove it since Danielle has such good alibies.

Then we met a devoted mother, Victoria Oliver, who is finding it hard to remember what normal really is. She would do anything to ensure that her troubled son has a childhood and left up to her ex-husband be in an institution. She will do whatever it takes to keep her son safe, even if that threat is her own son.

When the autopsy comes back that the fathers of the murdered family's was already dead before the supposed self-inflicted gunshot was fired throws the whole squad for a loop and now everyone is trying to figure out what the heck happened. A link soon pops up that connects the murdered families. The locked down psych unit. Each family had a child that had a period of stay there, yet in both cases the violent child was one of the murder victims, so what other connection could there be?
Perhaps it is Danielle. Maybe it is the new age healer, Andrew Lightfoot, who had been advising at least one of the families on how to 'treat' their child's violent behavioral issues, who holds the key?

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