I have read a couple of Lisa Gardner's thrillers in the past including Crash & Burn which is the third book in the Tessa Leoni series. In it, Tessa is a private investigator and some of her backstory that takes place in Love You More is mentioned. This made me want to read Love You More to get the details. Anyway, this novel tells how Tessa, a State Police Officer in Massachusetts, is accused of killing her husband and her young daughter, Sophie. She is found brutally beaten next to her husband who has been shot in the chest three times with Tessa's service revolver. So was her husband a wife abuser? Tessa was hit hard in the head with a bottle resulting in a concussion and her visit to the hospital also revealed some older injuries that could have been spousal abuse. Did she get tired of the abuse and decide to kill her spouse? Or did something else happen? D.D. Warren and Bobby Dodge are put on the investigation but all is not as it seems. The autopsy of Tessa's husband reveals he was killed earlier and Tessa winds up in jail but what happened to Sophie? The story is told from the perspective of two women police officers, Tessa and D.D. who finds it hard to believe that a mother could harm her daughter but she has seen a lot worse during her time with the police.
I enjoyed this tense thriller. It had a lot of twists to the story but it really wasn't too surprising. I have liked the other Gardner novels I have read and I'm sure I'll be reading more by her in the future.
Massachusetts State Police Trooper Tessa Leoni is found sitting in her kitchen beside the body of her husband, Brian Darby. Brian has three bullets in him, all fired from Tessa's gun. Tessa was fund badly beaten, so it looks like a case of self-defense. Boston homicide detective D.D. Warren knows there is more to the story than what she sees. Tessa's six-year-old daughter, Sophie, is missing. No one seems to know where she is. D.D. partners with Detective Bobby Dodge to search for the missing child; and find out what really happened in Tessa's kitchen.
This story is told from the two points-of-view, Tessa in the first person and D.D. in the third person. We are fed small pieces of information at a time. I sometimes felt lost in the story, wandering what was going on. I was halfway through the book before I started to understand what had happened in Tessa's kitchen. At that point I didn't want to put the book down.
This was a good story with lots of twists and turns. It's the fifth book in the D.D. Warren series. I still feel like I don't know much about D.D. She seems like a vague figure in her own series. At least the plot of the book was excellent and will make me continue to read more of the series. My rating: 4.5 Stars.
Don't think I've ever read a book by Lisa Gardner but will definitely look for her books in the future. I just started "Love you More" yesterday and can't put it down. It is keeping me in suspense of "who done it". (That doesn't sound grammatically correct. Good read. One minus though is that there are two lead female characters in this story and the way the author writes at times I have to reread a paragraph to figure out which person is speaking/thinking the words. I'm only halfway through the book and can't wait to finish.
