Product Description

Alone . . . Massachusetts State Trooper Bobby Dodge watches a tense hostage standoff unfold through the scope of his sniper rifle. Just across the street, in wealthy Back Bay, Boston, an armed man has barricaded himself with his wife and child. The man’s finger tightens on the trigger and Dodge has only a split second to react . . . and forever pay the consequences.

Alone . . . that’s where the nightmare began for cool, beautiful, and dangerously sexy Catherine Rose Gagnon. Twenty-five years ago, she was buried underground during a month-long nightmare of abduction and abuse. Now her husband has just been killed. Her father-in-law, the powerful Judge Gagnon, blames Catherine for his son’s death . . . and for the series of unexplained illnesses that have sent her own young son repeatedly to the hospital.

Alone . . . a madman survived solitary confinement in a maximum security prison where he’d done hard time for the most sadistic of crimes. Now he walks the streets a free man, invisible, anonymous . . . and filled with an unquenchable rage for vengeance. What brings them together is a moment of violence—but what connects them is a passion far deeper and much more dangerous. For a killer is loose who’s woven such an intricate web of evil that no one is above suspicion, no one is beyond harm, and no one will see death coming until it has them cornered, helpless, and alone.


From the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4580 in Books
• Published on: 2005-12-27
• Released on: 2005-12-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 480 pages

From Publishers Weekly
For 300-some pages, Gardner (The Perfect Husband) keeps readers spellbound—not just by her plot but by the beautifully realized character of Massachusetts police sniper Bobby Dodge. He meets his match in Catherine Gagnon, who as a girl was snatched, raped and nearly murdered. Now she's the wife of erratic, rich Jimmy Gagnon and mother of perpetually ill four-year-old Nathan. When Bobby kills Jimmy during a hostage situation at the Gagnons, he does it to save Catherine and Nathan. But was it a righteous shoot, or did Catherine engineer the killing? Judge James Gagnon and his wife, Maryanne, think Bobby murdered their son out of lust for Catherine. As other people start dying, very messily, and the DA and cops come down hard on Bobby, Gardner keeps the tension high and the pace fast. But resolution comes in what may be the clunkiest chase crafted by a pro this year: "Bobby processed everything at once. Three open doorways, three bedrooms. He ran by the first, then the second, and came sprinting into the third just in time to see Maryanne staggering back." Ten pages later, so many characters have run into so many rooms, it's amazing that the right person finally gets his head blown off by the right avenger. But Garner then ends with a neat postlude offering one more twist; her fans will feel requited.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
It was bad enough that Catherine Gagnon survived a horrible childhood abduction where for a month she lived in a cave and was the plaything for her sicko abductor. But now, 25 years later, she faces tragedy again as she fights to keep her son, Nathan. One chilly November night, a police sniper kills her husband, Jimmy, in response to her 911 call claiming he was about to hurt Nathan. Jimmy's death means that his parents, an influential judge and his blue-blooded wife, are more determined than ever to take Nathan from Catherine, whom they see as unfit to mother their only grandchild. True, the birth of Nathan mentally paralyzed Catherine, who could not get past the memories of her abduction and her emotionally absent parents. But is she really the monster the Gagnons and their PI make her out to be? Massachusetts state police special-ops officer Bobby Dodge, the sniper who took out Jimmy, doesn't think so, and unwittingly falls under the spell of the manipulative widow. A twisted, effective psychological thriller. Mary Frances Wilkens
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
'A dark and disturbing thriller.' IMAGE magazine 'This is a terrific psychological thriller - and another novel with a clever final twist to send the reader away happy.' -- Peter Guttridge THE OBSERVER 'Gardner has written a fine novel full of twists and it could go all the way for her.' -- Mark Timlin INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY 'There is an impressive air of gathering menace in this thriller, and you begin to understand why the strap on the cover reads 'Don't turn out the lights!' This is not a book you'd want to read in alone in a dimly lit place.' -- Matthew Lewin THE GUARDIAN 'This fast-moving thriller is a notch above Gardner's previous books and makes her a match for many of her best-selling compatriots.' -- Susanna Yager SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

Customer Reviews

Gardner's best effort to date
Bobby Dodge, member of the elite STOP team in Boston, MA, which deals with dangerous police situations, has just completed a grim task: as a sniper he has ended the life of a husband Jimmy Gagnon, who seemingly was on the verge of harming either his wife Catherine or his son Nathan. And to add to Bobby's distress at having to kill another man, he is immediately attacked by Jimmy's father, Judge James Gagnon, a powerful Boston personage, for acting rashly and caving in to the manipulations of Catherine.

But what is it about the past of Bobby, Catherine, and Jimmy, and even the Judge, that has led to this point? Lisa Gardner expertly combines the unfolding of traumatic disturbances in their lives with rapid fire developments in the present. Given her history, could Catherine, one with elegant, fragile beauty, orchestrate her own husband's death? Maybe Bobby knew more about the Gagnon's then he is telling - are his actions completely innocent? Why is the Judge's and his wife's past shrouded in mystery?

This is Lisa Gardner's best book, and most of her previous books were quite good. The plot is great and it moves. Yet the characters get the right amount of attention. And there are some nice twists. This latest effort by Gardner will disappoint few.

"Alone" has it all: abuse, lust, murder, revenge and healing
"Alone", by Lisa Gardner, NY, Bantam, 2004 ISBN 0-553-80253-4 (hc), 324 p., by author of 6 prior NYT best-selling novels (plus 13 others under a.k.a. Alicia Scott). Gardner at her finest renders a suspense novel entwining lives of police sniper Bobby Dodge and Boston socialite Catherine Gagnon with those messed-up lives of their ovn parents and "lustmord" of pedophilist Richard Umbrio. So yes, there's rape abduction, police homicides, and an escalating mess of murder by knife, hanging?, gun -- by chilling variant divating means.

We are immersed into finely-tuned and researched machinations of SWAT techniques, of alleged spousal & child abuse, of aftermath of incest, pedophilia and inappropriate use of financial and judicial power, and importantly a heartening and occasionally disheartening look into survival techniques used by people suffering from imperfections and fragility of the human condition and where the bottom line rings true that blood runs thicker than thieves.

Gardner's command of language, be it technical, romantic, carnal, or merely weaving fact with fiction is simply superb -- when novels get this good it is hard to say enough and I'd love to have a signed copy. Deservedly, I give it 5***** without hesitation.

Fun to Read Page-turner
This is a psychological crime novel about a woman whose husband is killed by a police sniper. The sniper kills the man because he appears to be ready to shoot his wife. It turns out that the woman and the police sniper have psychological baggage -- lots of it. The fact that the sniper kills the husband leads to an intense investigation, which is when all the twisting begins. The book has a villian that you just love to hate and a lovable child and puppy.

I actually enjoyed this book, much to my surprise. I am usually not a fan of "crime format" books. But the book was fairly well written, easy to read, and had some twists that made it impossible to preconceive how the book was going to end. All in all, not a bad book -- not great -- but not bad. A good book for reading on an airplane.

I will say that the twists and turns became a little confusing and it was somewhat hard to follow. Right up to the very end, I'm not sure exactly what happened. Maybe this was the author's intention; I don't know.