Live to Tell-Lisa Gardner

Live to Tell
Lisa Gardner
Bantam, Jul 13 2010, $26.00
ISBN: 9780553807240

She was nine tears old when Danielle Burton heard the shots that killed her mother and two siblings, and finally her father killed himself. Sheriff Warner took her from that house and over the years she became a children’s psychiatric nurse at Cambridge Hospital; home to children dangerous to others and themselves are housed. Danielle has no friends as work is her life.

Boston police detective D. D. Warren wishes she had a social life, but works always intercedes. On a date for the first time in forever, her beeper rings and she is called to Harrington House where a father killed his wife and their three children before committing suicide. The next day at the Laraquettee-Solis’s house, a drug selling father kills his lover and her for kids, and it looks like he took his own life. However he had a heart attack due to being tasered.. To Warren the crime scenes looks staged so she seeks a connection and finds one. Both families had children at the pediatric psych ward at Cambridge Hospital where Warren arrives to interrogate the staff, especially the survivor of a previous family massacre. At the same Victoria Oliver brings her troubled son Evan there.

Live to Tell is a heart pumping police procedural medical thriller that takes readers inside a facility where out of control dangerous children are sent for special treatment by dedicated mental health care professionals. Evan is a fascinating child who can be an angel one moment and a devil within a nanosecond. Readers will feel for his beleaguered mom who has doubts about filing him away but knows she cannot give him whatever he needs; it is difficult to decide to institutionalize your child. Fast-paced, readers will appreciate Warren’s dedicated and intense investigation while wondering whether the nurse lost it. However, it is the profound look into the children’s psychiatric ward that makes Lisa Gardner’s latest thriller a powerful drama.

Harriet Klausner