Live to Tell ( D. D. Warren, Book 4) [Mass Market Paperback]

Lisa Gardner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 28, 2010

LISA GARDNER WINNER OF THE ITW AWARD FOR BEST NOVEL*
 
On a warm summer night, in a working-class Boston neighborhood, four family members are brutally murdered. The father—and possible suspect—clings to life in the ICU. Murder-suicide? Or something even worse? Veteran police detective D. D. Warren is certain of only one thing: There’s more to this case than meets the eye.

Danielle Burton is not only a dedicated nurse at a locked-down pediatric psych ward but the haunted survivor of a shattered life. Meanwhile, devoted mother Victoria Oliver will do anything to ensure that her troubled son has some semblance of a childhood.

The lives of these three women unfold and connect in unexpected ways, as sins from the past emerge—and stunning secrets reveal just how tightly blood ties can bind. Sometimes the most devastating crimes are the ones closest to home.

 
* The Neighbor (Best Hardcover Novel)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Lisa Gardner Interviews Detective D.D. Warren

Lisa Gardner: D.D.--What do you find most fascinating/frustrating about working with the new guy, crime scene expert Alex Wilson?
D.D.: Alex seems sharp. Knows his blood spatter--I respect that in a guy. ‘Course, he’s been teaching at the Academy, which is one thing, while we’re now standing in a Dorchester home with five dead and carnage in every room. I don’t want lectures, I want results. This was a family--according the neighbors, even a nice family who seemed to actually like one another. Until, of course, the father snapped and killed them all. Or did he? These are the kinds of questions I gotta ask, and Prof Alex better be ready to answer.

LG: When did you know you were going to have your own novel?
D.D.: First time I walked on scene in Alone. Please, I’m five times tougher than fellow detective Bobby Dodge and twenty times smarter. Plus, I look damn good in Jimmy Choos. Let’s see the former sniper do my job in my heels, then we’ll talk.

LG: What's the most difficult case you've ever had to handle? Why?
D.D.: These past two family homicides. For one thing, any crime involving kids wrecks you a little. For another...I don’t believe in coincidence. Here are two families, totally different neighborhoods, socioeconomics, lifestyles, etc., yet they both wind up the same way, dead. Now, what are the odds of two totally different fathers going whacko in exactly the same way? I don’t believe it, but my boss isn’t into gut feel. All comes down to evidence. I would like some. Really, it would be nice right about now. Yo, Alex...

LG: What is the thing you love most about being a Boston P.D. Sergeant?
D.D.: Being in charge, calling all the shots, being the boss. Did I mention being in charge?

LG: What's on your nightstand? What's in the drawer?
D.D.: On my nightstand--back issue of the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin I keep meaning to read. In the drawer--emergency stash of chocolate, couple of condoms (don’t I wish), and a Kindle loaded up with the latest J.R. Ward steamy hot, seriously action-packed vampire novel. Tell anyone, and they will never find your body.

LG: Favorite food?
D.D.: I’ve always been partial to Italian. Which my squadmate Phil, told Alex all about. Now, Alex claims to be a serious Italian cook--apparently his mother is a Capozzoli and they know their Bolognese. A little wine, a little homemade pasta, a little tiramisu. All I gotta do is pick up the phone, tell him a time and date...one phone call. How hard can that be? One little call.

LG: You drive that butch police car all day. What's your idea of a dream ride?
D.D.: Walking on a beach. No car, no pager, no shoes. Just me, the wind, the waves and the cry of the gulls. I’d probably go nuts within minutes, but it would be nice to give peace a chance.

LG: Can you ever see yourself partnering successfully with another cop? Or are you the quintessential lone wolf?
D.D.: Excuse me, I love my squad and my squad loves me. Neil is one of the finest detectives around, plus better him than me viewing all the autopsies. And Phil--hey, family man, great wife, four kids, works in homicide to escape the violence. Gotta love Phil. They have my back and I have theirs. Life is good.

LG: I'm a woman traveling alone, staying in a hotel. What are your top three tips to keep me safe from psychos?
D.D.: Most hotel crimes have to do with property theft. Unfortunately, a guest walking in on a burglary, or a thief breaking in assuming the room’s vacant only to find a guest present, can lead to violence. Thus, your best defense is to always use the deadbolt, and always advertise when you’re “home,” so to speak.

1. Bolt all locks anytime you’re in the room and hang out the Do Not Disturb Sign
2. Double-check door is closed and latched (failures happen more than you think)
3. Try to avoid staying in rooms closest to the elevators and/or stairs--these rooms are more frequently targeted by thieves as the location allows for quick getaways.

LG: Do you have any scars?
D.D.: Maybe, but you should see the other guy. Give as good as you get, that’s always been my motto.

LG: What's the most you've ever spent on a pair of shoes? Describe!
D.D.: Silver sequined Jimmy Choos, on sale $500. Should never have bought them, but they’re really pretty and when I wear them, I don’t look like a cop, walk like a cop, or think like a cop. How does that commercial go...? Oh yeah, priceless.

LG: If you had to: dog or cat?
D.D.: No! Never! Don’t even think it!

LG: Tell me something I don't know about you.
D.D.: I like mobiles. Don’t ask me why. But there’s something cool about looking up and watching the various shapes and colors slowly twist around. Sometimes, after a really bad day, I go home, close my eyes and create mobiles in my head--maybe one with bright origami animals, or another with silver geometric shapes. I let them go round and round, til finally I can sleep. Then when I wake up, I’ll know something critical about the crime--a piece of the puzzle I missed the day before, a clue I’d overlooked. I think it’s from focusing on patterns. That’s what crimes are, really--very violent patterns that a good detective must deconstruct, then rebuild in her head.

LG: Worst crime scene?
D.D.: The mummified remains of six girls on the grounds of the abandoned mental institute in Mattapan. Never saw anything like it, never want to again. Funny, that was Bobby Dodge’s first case as a detective (Hide)--got him a wife, and now a baby girl. But he never talks about it, and neither do I. Sometimes, finding justice for the victims isn’t enough, but it’s all we got. So a good detective walls it up, puts a Do Not Disturb Sign on that section of memory and walks away. Gotta in this job, or you’ll go mad.

LG: What do you wish you knew five years ago?
D.D.: Can a working woman have it all? Five years ago, I sweated my job. I worried I wasn’t working smart enough, closing cases fast enough. Now, I sweat my entire life. Am I working too hard? Missing out on other parts of life? Maybe I should take Alex up on his offer of homemade alfredo, except can I really be the detective I need to be, while trying to be the girlfriend I’d like to be? Can’t figure it out. So I wish that I’d realized five years ago, how good I had it. That focusing only on my policing career was a luxury I’d never have again. Spoken like a true workaholic, huh?

---

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. At the heart of Gardner's outstanding fourth novel featuring Boston PD detective Warren (after The Neighbor) are some very sick kids, notably Lucy, a nine-year-old feral girl who self-mutilates when any attention is given to her, and Evan, an eight-year-old boy who during fits threatens to kill his mother. D.D gets involved after two grisly family annihilations lead to the locked-down pediatric psych ward in Cambridge that specializes in Lucy's and Evan's types of hard case. When a child is too sick and the parent can no longer handle care, the child ends up in the acute care facility under the tutelage of pediatric psych nurse Danielle, the lone survivor of her own family bloodbath. Coincidence? That's for D.D. to figure out--in the midst of a budding romance with police academy professor Alex Wilson and infuriating encounters with Andrew Lightfoot, resident "woo-woo expert" (that's cop talk for psychic), who works in tandem with the hospital. Plenty of red herrings keep readers guessing, but Gardner always plays fair in this tight and consistently engaging page-turner.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 464 pages
• Publisher: Bantam; Reprint edition (December 28, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553591916
• ISBN-13: 978-0553591910
• Product Dimensions: 4.2 x 1 x 6.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (135 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #17,932 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #28 in Books > 4-for-3 Books > Mystery & Thrillers > Police Procedurals
  • #87 in Books > 4-for-3 Books > Mystery & Thrillers > Mystery > General
  • #92 in Books > 4-for-3 Books > Mystery & Thrillers > Thrillers > Suspense

More About the Author

New York Times #1 bestselling crime novelist Lisa Gardner began her career in food service, but after catching her hair on fire numerous times, she took the hint and focused on writing instead. A self-described research junkie, she has parlayed her interest in police procedure, cutting edge forensics and twisted plots into a streak of thirteen bestselling suspense novels, including her most recent release, Catch Me.

Readers are invited to get in on the fun by entering the annual "Kill a Friend, Maim a Mate" Sweepstakes, where they can nominate the person of their choice to die in Lisa's latest novel. Every year, one Lucky Stiff is selected for Literary Immortality. It's cheaper than therapy, and you get a great book besides. For more details, simply visit Lisa's website.

Lisa lives in New England with her family, as well as two highly spoiled dogs and one extremely neurotic three-legged cat.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

95 of 99 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Harrowing Story of Violent Children Mixed With Murder Mystery, July 13, 2010

By 

Jennifer "Jenners" (Sicklerville, NJ, United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Live to Tell: A Detective D. D. Warren Novel (Hardcover)

I've read almost all of Lisa Gardner's books (with my favorites being her Quincy and Rainie books). Lately, though, I was wondering if she had lost her mojo. I thought her last book, The Neighbor, was just OK. But I'm nothing if not loyal (until you write at least three awful books in a row), so I thought I'd give Gardner another try. Well, I'm glad I gave Gardner the benefit of the doubt because this book was one of her better ones.

There are a lot of books out there (including Gardner's books) that deal with twisted psyches and unimaginable violence. But what makes this book so disturbing is that it acknowledges that sometimes the twisted psyches belong to children. In her Author's Note, Gardner talks about friends of hers who had a troubled child and their struggles to find a way to save their son. Like Gardner, I tended to believe that troubled children were that way because of abuse and neglect. It is easier to understand how children who have been beaten, abused, tortured, or neglected become violent or primal. What isn't easy to understand is when a child with loving and attentive parents is violent. Isn't such behavior the result of nurture ... not nature? I think we all would prefer to believe this. But, as we learn throughout this book, that isn't always the case. Sometimes children are born without the psychological make-up they need to interact appropriately with others. Mental health professionals and facilities (like the locked-down pediatric psych ward described in the book) are working with these children to help them function in society.

This is Gardner's fourth D.D. Warren book, and I'm still unclear why D.D. is a recurring character as she doesn't seem particularly well-developed. Four books in and all I really know about her is that she is too involved with her job to have a life. Although Gardner attempts to give Warren a bit of romance in this book, I didn't find that storyline all that compelling, and I honestly don't give much thought to this being "A Detective D.D. Warren Novel." (A fact that was trumpeted across the front of my ARC.) To be honest, the characters of Danielle and Victoria were better developed than D.D.'s character. This doesn't really detract from the book, I guess. D.D. simply functions as the reader's way of getting information to solve the crime. Yet it seems a bit odd to create a detective and build books around her without giving her much of a personal life or back story.

My Final Recommendation

If you're a Lisa Gardner fan, I think this was one of her better books. The story is disturbing and harrowing and will take you to places you might not want to go. If you're a fan of disturbing, psychological mysteries, this would be an excellent choice for you. However, if these types of books aren't your cup of tea, stay away! This book is candid in its descriptions of violent children and makes you want to take a long hot shower afterward.

50 of 58 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bad woo-woo on the interplanes, May 30, 2010

By 

Linda Bulger (United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Live to Tell: A Detective D. D. Warren Novel (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

LIVE TO TELL is the fourth book in best-selling author Lisa Gardner's Detective D.D. Warren series; for all the horror of its subject matter, readers will find it impossible to put down. D.D. Warren is a thirty-eight year old blonde, head of a three-person homicide unit in the Boston Police Department. Her work gives her little time for a personal life.

The call that interrupts D.D.'s latest blind date is horrific: a "family annihilation," the murder-suicide of a family of five. It appears that the father succumbed to the pressure of financial problems and perpetrated this terrible deed. But when another family suffers the same fate the very next night, D.D.'s cop instinct tells her to look for connections--and the connections lead to a locked-down children's acute psych unit where the most troubled of children are brought for care.

One of the caregivers at the psych unit, Danielle, has her own crushing past. She was the sole survivor of the near-annihilation of her own family and, unable to leave the past behind, she is burying herself in her work as the twenty-fifth anniversary of that event draws near. It's clear that Danielle is in some sense a link between the past and the present, but what is the nature of that link?

The medical system offers all too little for these explosive children and their families. Some are the victims of abuse or gross neglect but others have caring families and are victims of their own chemistry. The pharmaceuticals that usually work on adults with crippling mood disorders are far less effective in children. The kind of collaborative therapies that have some success in a locked therapeutic environment are extremely hard to maintain in a family home. Is it any wonder that families sometimes seek healing from a different plane--the spiritual plane? Several of the families in D.D.'s case have worked with a spiritual healer who teaches the children techniques for fighting off the darkness threatening to overwhelm their spirits. We may not warm to the character of the healer, Andrew, and D.D. is intensely skeptical of his work with (as he describes it) "souls in the interplanes," locked in the void between the planes of existence, struggling to complete their missions and move on. Even Andrew himself refers to his work as "woo-woo" but claims it's as valid as a good cop's intuition.

Dark though the story is, the writing is so effective that you are in a sense left to draw your own conclusions in the end. The good guys win and the bad guys lose, and that's all we really need to know. Or ... is it?

Linda Bulger, 2010

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Intensely gripping psychological thriller, October 1, 2010

By 

Elizabeth A. White (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Live to Tell: A Detective D. D. Warren Novel (Hardcover)

Live To Tell, the fourth novel by Lisa Gardner featuring Boston PD detective D. D. Warren, opens with Warren being called out to the scene of a horrific mass murder; an entire family is dead, the wife and three kids apparently killed by the husband before he shot himself in the head.

Something about the case doesn't feel quite right to Warren, but before she can identify what it is another family is killed, also in an apparent mass murder-suicide scenario. This time, however, the autopsy is conclusive: the husband was dead before the supposed self-inflicted gunshot was fired. Someone else killed these families.

Warren's quest to find out who really committed the brutal murders and how - if at all - they were connected leads her to a pediatric psych ward that specializes in mentally unbalanced children who've displayed violence toward themselves or others. Turns out both families had a child who had spent time there. Yet, in both cases the violent child was one of the murder victims, so what other connection could there be?

Perhaps it lies with Danielle Burton, one of the pediatric nurses at the facility, who herself is the lone survivor of a massacre that claimed her entire family... the 25th anniversary of which is only two days away. Or maybe it's new age healer Andrew Lightfoot, who had been advising at least one of the families on how to `treat' their child's violent behavioral issues, who holds the key. And how do divorced mother Victoria Oliver and her astonishingly violent eight-year-old son, Evan, fit into the mix?

As Warren figures out exactly how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together, author Gardner takes the reader deep into a subject one does not see addressed with such frankness often in crime fiction: children with serious, violent mental disorders. Not "Damien from the Omen" or Children of The Corn kids, but real young people struggling with mental and chemical imbalances which cause them to act out in horrific ways.

It's sobering material that, mishandled, could come across as sensational or exploitative. But Gardner has obviously done her homework on the topic, and weaves interesting details about such children and how they are treated into what is an intensely gripping psychological thriller.