Book Review – Live To Tell

Live To Tell
Author – Lisa Gardner
464 pages
Mystery/Thriller

Detective DD Warren is in the middle of what she hopes will be a hot date when her pages goes off….ruining yet another night out.  She’s called to a grisly scene.  Three children and their mother murdered…the mother and two sons stabbed to death, the daughter strangled.  And it looks like dad did it, only he’s not talking.  He shot himself in the head, but luckily for DD and the other detectives, dad’s still alive.  For a few moments the detectives are as happy as one could be at a scene such as the one they’re at because they’re pretty positive the dad did it.  But wait….if the father is a family annihalator and set out to kill his wife, three kids and himself, then why are there SIX plates set at the dinner table?  They hope to get answers from dad when/if he wakes up, but no such luck…..dad eventually succumbs to his wounds and dies.

The next day DD and her team are called to another scene almost exactly like the first.  Mother and four children dead, dad sitting on the couch dead from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound.  But there’s another head scratcher moment.  If dad shot and killed himself, why does he have burn marks on his chest that appear to have come from a taser? 

The only connection between these two families that DD and her group can find is that one child from each family received treatment at a pediatric psych ward in Boston.  This is where Danielle works, and Danielle has a dark past of her own.  At the age of 10 her father killed her mother and her brother and sister before blowing his own brains out right in front of Danielle….leaving her the lone survivor.  Did she live because he loved her that much, or because he hated her that much?  Regardless, Danielle has survived, and now dediates her life helping the children brought to the psych ward….each with a more horrifying story of abuse and neglect than the next.

And then there’s Victoria.  Victoria had a husband and two children…..8 year old Evan and 6 year old Chelsea.  Evan had been a handful from the minute he was born prematurely.  One minute he will hug you, the next he will attack you, screaming he wants to carve your heart out and eat it.  The day he took a crowbar to all the windows in the house, Victoria’s husband left and took their six year old daughter with him.  He wanted Evan to get professional help, to be put in a hospital, but Victoria couldn’t do it.  She was convinced she could help her son.  So now her life is living in the home she has had to make a fortress so Evan can’t get out, walking on eggshells at all times because one never knows when Evan will fly into a rage, and doing her best to always ALWAYS make sure the knives have been put away where Evan can’t get to them.  Once in a great while, after Evan has been sufficiently drugged with Ativan and is sleeping, she will also make time for a lover.  One day Victoria notices a knife missing.  She looks in all of Evan’s hiding spots but can’t find it.  Evan knows she’s looking for it and taunts her.  Now she has to live in fear….wondering when, not IF, it will happen…..will this be the day or night Evan tries to kill her.

Linking the two murdered families, Dani and Victoria and Evan is someone who is pure evil….and DD and her team have to figure out who it is fast…..before one more family meets the same fate.

This is one of those books I literally hated to put down.  When I would finally have to at night so I could get some sleep for work the next day, I would find myself lying awake thinking about the book, and wondering what was going to happen next.  This book, in my opinion, was truly a nail biting thriller!  Two huge thumbs up!!