
Narrator: Emily Janice Card, Kirby Heyborne, Kirsten Potter
Series: Detective D.D. Warren #3
Published by Random House Audio on June 16, 2009
Genres: Suspense
Length: 13 hours and 29 minutes
Format: Audiobook
Source: Library
Goodreads
Amazon, Audible, Libro.fm, Barnes & Noble





From a master of suspense comes a chilling new novel that explores the dangers lurking closer than you think. Because even in the perfect family, you never know what is going on behind closed doors….
This is what happened…
It was a case guaranteed to spark a media feeding frenzy—a young mother, blond and pretty, disappears without a trace from her South Boston home, leaving behind her four-year-old daughter as the only witness and her handsome, secretive husband as the prime suspect.
In the last six hours…
But from the moment Detective Sergeant D. D. Warren arrives at the Joneses’ snug little bungalow, she senses something off about the picture of wholesome normality the couple worked so hard to create. On the surface, Jason and Sandra Jones are like any other hardworking young couple raising a four-year-old child. But it is just under the surface that things grew murky.
Of the world as I knew it….
With the clock ticking on the life of a missing woman and the media firestorm building, Jason Jones seems more intent on destroying evidence and isolating his daughter than on searching for his “beloved” wife. Is the perfect husband trying to hide his guilt—or just trying to hide? And will the only witness to the crime be the killer’s next victim?



I do like these stories because you get the POV of several members of the cast. We get to see things from Detective Warren’s POV, but also the victims, other police, witnesses among others. Even with all of these POVs, I still didn’t know what happened in this story until Lisa Gardner wanted me to know.
When a young mother goes missing, and the father acts unusually, it really makes the police suspicious. And even with the father’s POV, he seems a bit suspicious, with him hiding his computer from the police and not doing much to help with the investigation. As the story goes on, we find they have a very interesting marriage. They rarely spend time together and when they do it is all about their young daughter. She works during the day, he works at night. The girl goes to preschool for a little while during the day, while dad sleeps. They never have babysitters. It is always one of them with her.
On top of that, we find out that there’s a sex offender down the street. Get his POV too, as he goes to work and gets fired when the police start asking questions. His boss knew of his police status, but he was a car mechanic and was always in the garage and away from children, so it seemed like good work for someone who couldn’t be around children. He had a relationship when he was just an adult with a teenager, not right, but he wasn’t into young children, but the law and the registry doesn’t care. We also follow him to his group meetings where you can see him struggle with the police scrutiny.
There are a lot of twists and turns in this story. And it seems the deeper they dig, the more suspects they get, not less. I will say that I was not at all expecting the ending of this story. It came completely unexpected. I don’t want to go into more detail or else I might give away spoilers.
I not only loved the story, but really grew to like the characters. I grew very worried for four-year-old Clarissa “Ree”. She was such a sweet little girl and you didn’t know what was going to happen to her, especially when her father is one of the prime suspects. Then there was Adian Brewster, the sex offender. I really did feel a bit sorry for him. They go into how hard it is to be a sex offender. It’s expensive, because he has to pay for group meetings, polygraphs and more. And he doesn’t get paid much, because his boss knows he has little options. And finding a place to live isn’t easy either. What he did was wrong, but his life is ruined forever. Anyway, you get to where you connect with these characters.
I’m really enjoying this series, and have already listened to the next book in the series. So more to come on it later.
Narration:
This has several narrators, some of which I’ve listened to before. Each narrator takes at least one POV, which makes it really easy to tell when you switch POVs, even if in mid-chapter. Emily Janice Card, Kirby Heyborne, and Kirsten Potter all did a great job with the narration. I’ve listened to a lot of Kirby Heyborne and some of Kirsten Potter, but this was a new experience for me with Emily Janice Card. I have to say I really liked them all. I love that they all had about the same speed when they performed. I have had multi-narrator stories where I almost needed to adjust the speed between the two narrators. That is not an issue here. I felt that we went from POV to POV or narrator to narrator seamlessly. It really helped me get lost in the story. I would listen to any of them again.
Listen to a clip: HERE
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The husband is always the first suspect when a wife goes missing and if he’s acting strangely well, that just puts the spotlight on him more. This sounds like a good one.
Unexpected ending? Weeee!