Review: Alone by Lisa Gardner

First line: He’d put in a fifteen-hour shift the night the call came in.

Why I read this: I had read the last two in the DD Warren series and wanted to go back and read the rest of the series.

Synopsis: Alone . . . Massachusetts State Trooper Bobby Dodge watches a tense hostage standoff unfold through the scope of his sniper rifle. Just across the street, in wealthy Back Bay, Boston, an armed man has barricaded himself with his wife and child. The man’s finger tightens on the trigger and Dodge has only a split second to react . . . and forever pay the consequences.

Alone . . . that’s where the nightmare began for cool, beautiful, and dangerously sexy Catherine Rose Gagnon. Twenty-five years ago, she was buried underground during a month-long nightmare of abduction and abuse. Now her husband has just been killed. Her father-in-law, the powerful Judge Gagnon, blames Catherine for his son’s death . . . and for the series of unexplained illnesses that have sent her own young son repeatedly to the hospital.

Alone . . . a madman survived solitary confinement in a maximum security prison where he’d done hard time for the most sadistic of crimes. Now he walks the streets a free man, invisible, anonymous . . . and filled with an unquenchable rage for vengeance. What brings them together is a moment of violence—but what connects them is a passion far deeper and much more dangerous. For a killer is loose who’s woven such an intricate web of evil that no one is above suspicion, no one is beyond harm, and no one will see death coming until it has them cornered, helpless, and alone.

My thoughts: Last year I was asked to read Lisa Gardner’s Live To Tell. I really enjoyed it and then after finishing it, realized it was part of a series and was number 4 in that series. I was then asked this Spring to read Love You More, the 5th in the series. Again, I enjoyed the book and decided that I really had to get the first three books in the series before any more came out.

Alone is for the most part Bobby Dodge’s story, but we are introduced to Detective DD Warren. The story is about a survivor. Catherine was snatched by a pedophile when she was young, trapped in a dark hole in the ground, and abused for nearly a month. She was found and rescued at random, but has never quite since gotten over her fear of the dark. Years have passed – she has a child, a husband, a life, and now suddenly, things have gone wrong. Bobby, a police SWAT sniper, responds to Catherine’s call that her husband has a gun and is threatening the family. In a split second decision, he shoots the husband to save the wife and child. But things aren’t at all as simple as they seem – and it might be that someone arranged all of it. Full of twists and turns and the revealing of some long-buried secrets, this book kept me captivated from the first page. What I like most is that Lisa Gardner gives you the point of view of every character involved so that you are fully aware of what everyone is thinking and/or going through. You are kind of thrown into this one from the start and then she back tracks so that the pieces to all your questions start coming together. I really liked this one and am looking forward to reading the next one in the series, Hide.

(I purchased this e-book.)