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Lisa Gardner 

Bantam Dell

1745 Broadway, NY, NY 10019

0553804324 $25.00 www.bantamdell.com 800-726-0600

In a return to some of the characters introduced in her last book, Alone, Lisa Gardner has written another thriller certain to rise to the top of the bestseller list. And deservedly so.

Annabelle Mary Granger is a young woman whose name has been an ever-changing thing in her life. From the time she was a young girl, she and her parents periodically fled their home, bags always packed and at the ready, for a forced move to another city, another part of the country, with new names being arbitrarily picked out and adopted. It began when she was seven and her father told her: "You need to go into your room. Pick two things. Any two things you want. But hurry, Annabelle, we don't have much time." That happened at least twelve times. And she has never known why. Now, 25 years later, with both her parents dead and having returned to Boston, the city where she spent her earliest years, she gets the first clue: She sees her name in the local paper, identified as being one of six bodies of young girls discovered accidentally in a decades-old grave. She turns to the cops heading up the investigation, including Bobby Dodge, introduced in the earlier book, now a Massachusetts State homicide detective, who is stunned at the resemblance she, and this case, share with an earlier and equally traumatic case involving a woman who was a victim at the age of twelve in that novel. As she is told by that woman: "Being a victim is a one-way ticket, Annabelle. This is who you are now and no one will ever let you go back."

I must admit to some brief confusion caused by chapters changing point of view from time to time, switching from Annabelle to Bobby, with no immediate way to identify the narrator. But of course this becomes clear very quickly, and it is a minor quibble. The tale is fast-paced, well-written, with fascinating characters, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.