Live To Tell

Author: Lisa Gardner

It’s been a long time since I’d laid hands on a good detective novel. In fact I’d no knowledge about which are the good detective novel authors these days. So when I read great reviews about this novel, I decided to try it out. I was a little disappointed; maybe my expectations were very high. Somehow it didn’t feel like a detective novel – one where I would be taking turns to point my finger at every other character because the author has me convinced that all the evidence says so.

The story focuses around mentally disturbed or rather I should say traumatized children. They’re children who’re so violent that they can even kill somebody. That was new to me and kind of hard to digest. It’s difficult to portray kids who go around killing people. Anyway the story is about three women – one who’s such a mentally disturbed child, another who works as a nurse in a hospital for such kids and third who’s a detective. It starts with the murder of a family of five. At the face of it, it looks like the father killed everybody including himself. On investigation it is learned that one of the children was mentally disturbed and was sighted killing squirrels, etc. So he’s a potential suspect. Then another family of 6 in a completely unrelated neighborhood is killed. The crime scene has lots of similarities. Again, a little girl in the family was mentally ill. To add to it, the nurse also has a similar history. Twenty five years ago her family was killed in a similar manner except that she was spared. Is she a victim or a suspect?

It was interesting but not as engrossing as I’d expected.

Bottom line: a good read.