[title subtitle=”review Anita Paddock”][/title]
By Lisa Scottoline
St. Martin’s Press, 338 pages: $27.99
This novel, written by Lisa Scottoline, the author of twenty-one other mysteries, is a great summer read. It’s fast paced, thought provoking, and keeps you enthralled until the very last page.
The monumental question at the center of the story is this: How far would you go to protect your child?
Interesting question, isn’t it? And that’s what this story is about: the moral and ethical dilemma one family faces, and how one lie leads to another, and another, and another.
This novel takes us into the lives of the Buckman family. Jake, the father, is an accountant who lost his job during the financial bust in the mid-2000s, and worked night and day to dig his way out. He started his own consulting company, a business that is now thriving, but he realizes he neglected his family along the way. His wife, Pam, is a Philadelphia judge who has a good chance to become a federal judge. Their son, Ryan, is a tall, good-looking fifteen-year-old basketball player who studies hard and hopes to get in an Ivy League university.
This is a family that has always done the right thing. But when Ryan hits a jogger with his car on a dark road late at night, Jake, who let Ryan behind the wheel, decides the best thing to do is just leave the dead girl there. Clearly, they both know this isn’t the moral thing to do, but Jake doesn’t want his son’s life ruined, which he believes it will be if he confesses.
They vow not to tell Pam, so they must keep the secret from her as well as everyone else. Then they discover the dead girl was a classmate of Ryan’s. Ryan feels horrible. Soon, he’s underperforming on the basketball court, which causes the coach to wonder what’s wrong. Pam wonders, too, and eventually she finds out. To make matters even worse, Jake is blackmailed by a man who saw the hit and run and filmed it on his phone.
What’s next? The blackmailer is murdered, but who did it?
This novel is filled with suspense, with twists you won’t see coming, and it shows us how one lapse in judgment can send even the best family careening down a dark, dark path.
