Hide: a novel by Lisa Gardner

First-rate thriller***** April 4,2007

Tired of the pablum put out under James Patterson's name? Then pick up this novel and see what first-rate crime writing is all about. Lisa Gardner exceeds all her previous efforts in this sizzling thriller that keeps you riveted from beginning to end. We are introduced to the fearful world of Annabelle Granger whose childhood memories are a blur of cities and changing identities. Her father kept moving her and her mother from city to city every year or two with no explanation. But Annabelle's mother and father are now both dead and she returns to the city from which she first fled as a seven-year-old. As she is developing new roots under a new identity, police discover six corpses in an underground chamber on the grounds of a former mental hospital. One of them is wearing a necklace inscribed "Annabelle Granger." State detective Bobby Dodge is brought in to assist in the investigation by his former lover D.D.Warren. In the end Dodge and Warren race to rescue Annabelle from the clutches of a predator and unravel the mystery of who killed the young women.Gardner's top-notch writing keeps us in a trance as the plot unfolds.