"Alone" by Lisa Gardner

I've been pulling books off my shelves that I acquired via the Mystery Book Club a few years ago and hadn't gotten around to reading.

One of these thrillers is "Alone" by Lisa Gardner, published in 2005. This mystery pairs a likable Massachusetts SWAT team member, Bobby Dodge, and a less likable socialite, Catherine Gagnon, who was the survivor of a horrendous abduction and rape as a child 25 years before. What Bobby needs to find out is whether Gagnon intentionally loured him into shooting her husband during a domestic incident, and whether Catherine is responsible for her own 4 year old son's chronic illness. When people surrounding Catherine start being murdered it becomes clear that Bobby, Catherine and her young son, Nathan, are targets.

As I read this suspense novel my own community has been gripped by the murder and attempted murder of two young boys. Their mother is accused of the crime and, reportedly, even she can't really identify why she did it. It is clear that children who face trauma of this type need a tremendous amount of psychological counseling and lots of support by family and friends for years in order to grow up feeling secure and in charge of their own future.

Dodge and Gagnon both suffered abuse and parental loss as children, and both showed the emotional scars into adulthood. With professional help, both managed to recover some semblance of normalcy, and the book does in that respect have a "happy" ending.

This book is not for the faint-hearted. There is a considerable amount of gore and multiple gruesome deaths in this book. It is an interesting psychological thriller, and one that is hard to put down once started.

Liz Nichols