I usually like Lisa Gardner in general, but not so much her earlier books and definitely not this one.

One of my favorite things about Gardner's thrillers is how readable they are. I can't help but notice writing styles and if I'm not a fan, it's really distracting for me in a book. Even if I like the writing style, half the time I wind up thinking about it. But Gardner's writing flows so well and is so, I don't know how to describe it, out of the way? That I'm only thinking about the story itself. And I mean that as a compliment. It takes good writing to not be noticed. But this book was weird because it didn't feel like her usual style. Especially early on it was so fragmented and distracted. It felt like I was struggling just to read it and keep up with the random thoughts. This is one of her earliest books so at least it's interesting to see how much she's grown as a writer.

As far as plots go, I wasn't a fan of this one. There was a lot of insurance fraud and playing games over past crimes, but not a whole lot of real drama in the present day. It felt very manufactured and obvious, but at the same time it didn't make sense. I figured out pretty early what the plot twist was (before we evening got to the big red herring plot twist which was so painfully obviously not the truth), but half of the characters' motivations didn't make sense. There was a big discussion on profiling at one point early on and technically there was a motivation assigned to everyone at the end, but it was so outside of what their personalities were described as. It didn't make sense.

And speaking of characterization, this book did one of my least favorite things. It introduced the main character Melanie as someone stoic and strong who hated crying, especially in front of others. She then proceeded to spend half the book collapsing in tears, mostly into the arms of the big strong FBI agent. I don't care if a character cries a lot, but for the love of god don't describe her one way and then spend three hundred pages completely contradicting that initial description. Just write a character who cries.

This book was also real heavy on the romance which I wasn't expecting. Gardner's books usually include romance as a side plot (although not always), but this felt almost more like romantic suspense than straight thriller. Like the romance felt equally important to the story itself as the murder plot. Which isn't inherently bad, just not my general thing.

A lot of just unrealistic things too. Like I get that with thrillers, you gotta suspend a little disbelief to have the main character in a cop book be involved in the investigation, but there aren't going to be multiple professional federal agents just including her on a call about an active murder case that she is personally involved with, both in terms of her family and her present day victimhood. Also at one point someone (spoilers) made a plan to drug a nine year old to make her forget the first nine years of her life. Pretty sure there aren't drugs that can do that with any sort of reliability or consistency. At least not enough to rely on that keeping you out of prison.

It definitely held my attention, if only for the cheap thriller drama and figuring out all the little details of what happened. One of the reasons I like thrillers is that even when I don't think they're good, I'm usually still along for the ride. But this wasn't one of Gardner's better books. She's definitely written some good ones and I feel like most people could give this a pass without missing much. Unless you're a hardcore fan and reading through all her works like me. In which case it's definitely not the worst thing I've ever read. Just one of those not very good books that I'll probably forget pretty quick.