She Treads Softly: Never Tell

Friday, February 15, 2019

Never Tell

Never Tell by Lisa Gardner
Penguin Random House: 2/19/19
eBook review copy; 416 pages
ISBN-13: 9781524742089
Detective D. D. Warren Series #10

Never Tell by Lisa Gardner is a very highly recommended procedural and suspenseful thriller featuring Boston's Detective D.D. Warren and victim's advocate/vigilante Flora Dane. This is an excellent novel and a superb addition to the D.D. Warren series.

Evie Carter returns home to find her husband, Conrad, dead in his home office. He has been shot three times, but Evie takes his gun and shoots his computer twelve times. The police arrive and see Evie, who is obviously pregnant and still holding the gun. D.D. Warren arrives on the scene and recognizes Evie from a case sixteen years ago, when Evie was 16 and accidentally shot her father, a Harvard professor. Two shootings can't be coincidental, as far as Warren is concerned.

When Flora Dane sees Conrad Carter's face on the news, she immediately recognizes him from when she was still a captive of kidnapper, Jacob Ness. Ness took her to a bar where they met Conrad. Now Flora must revisit her past to try and remember what she knows about Conrad. She is also determined to discover the truth behinds Conrad's murder and how it may be tied into crimes by Ness.

Never Tell is an outstanding, fast-paced, intricate procedural that delves into dark secrets and has questions and complications multiplying with every chapter. This is an un-put-down-able novel that had me glued to every page, breathless with anxiety and anticipation wondering what could possibly happen next and what new information would be uncovered. The writing and pacing is superb. The plot is complex, intelligent, and astute. The final climax is disturbing, clever, heart-stopping, and brilliant. Truly, Never Tell is a stay-up-way-too-late-to-read-just-one-more-chapter novel.

The characters are all well-developed and well-established at this point. For those who are new to the series, you can enjoy this as a stand-alone novel, but fans of the series will appreciate it even more as they will have a greater insight into the characters. There simply has to be another addition to the series as soon as possible as there are several questions that need answers, and some developments that require further exploration, and other questions that need to attain a degree of closure.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Penguin Random House.

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John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.