Lisa Gardner shocks readers from the very beginning, opening Look for Me with a grisly scene — an entire family murdered execution-style with the eldest daughter on the run. The clock starts ticking as Detective D.D. Warren and team race to find the teenage girl who could either be the culprit or in the cross hairs of a killer. This fast-moving, fast-paced narrative certainly feels like a race as tension ratchets and bullets fly. There is never a dull moment as D.D. tries to unravel what seems to be an endlessly tangled tale of abuse, abandonment and anger … D.D. and Flora uncover surprising truths, and everyone is a suspect at one time or another. Family, friendships and foster relationships are explored in this emotional, page-turning thriller.
Per usual, Gardner infuses her narrative with timely and topical social issues that deserve a closer look; here, the abuses and limitations of the foster care system come under the microscope, as do other matters including dependency, exploitation, gang violence, and PTSD. So too the struggles of working mothers like D. D. Warren, who endeavor to balance their personal and professional lives without compromising either. It’s these elements that ground the author’s propulsive plots in a sense of realism despite their fictional flourishes. Look for Me is a worthy addition to Lisa Gardner’s outstanding oeuvre.
Lisa Gardner’s Look For Me is a fast-paced, compelling crime thriller that twists and turns its way to a nail-biting ending. The opening chapter is intense, shocking, and heartbreaking. . . and certainly isn’t for the faint of heart. D.D. Warren might be the series protagonist, but Gardner has another star on her hands in Flora Dane, who steals the spotlight and makes this already gripping story even better.
...exciting … D.D. and Flora each pursue different avenues of investigation, uncovering shocking secrets about a family in crisis and a troubled teen who has nothing to lose. Gardner shines a heartbreaking light on foster care abuse while steadily ratcheting up the tension to a genuinely surprising and emotional finale.
The execution-style murders of a family and the disappearance of their eldest daughter once again bring together a seasoned homicide detective and a kidnap victim–turned-vigilante to find the killer … . In an awkwardly patched-in subplot, another Gardner regular, kidnap survivor Flora Dane, who now runs a support/empowerment group of sorts for women who’ve lived through similar trauma, realizes Roxy approached her group before disappearing, making Flora determined to find her before the police do. She and D.D. enter an uneasy, and entirely preposterous, partnership, each exploring her own leads in a case that, while tragic, becomes more predictable with each supposed wrinkle and stereotypical villain.
