Live To Tell [Mass Market Paperback]

At one time life seemed normal but Lauren Walsh's divorce changed everything. She can no longer trust her instincts or the very things she once took for granted. When her youngest daughter Sadie loses her stuffed animal, Lauren tries to reassure her, but the loss of her father has made Sadie more than insistent. When Lauren calls her ex-husband Nick to search the lost and found at Grand Central Station, she demands he pay attention to their children's needs. Lauren's actions set in motion a train of events that will change her life and that of everyone around her. When her husband suddenly disappears, Lauren tries to reassure herself and her children, while not embarrassing herself before former friends and acquaintances. As Lauren tries to find answers, forces she knows nothing about gather, endangering her family in ways she never could have imagined. Outside, a dangerous man will do anything to preserve the secret he has guarded for years. Will Lauren discover the truth in enough time? In trying to protect one's family, how far is one willing to go?

Wendy Corsi Staub's LIVE TO TELL is an awesome work of suspense! Well-plotted, well-imagined, and rich in emotional and character details, LIVE TO TELL takes an all too common scenario, divorce, and twists ideas of family trust and protection into a terrifying scenario. LIVE TO TELL grabs from the very first pages as the reader enters Lauren's world. The author captures perfectly Lauren's distrust and self-questioning following her divorce. The awkwardness she experiences before others now, trying to appear strong while she becomes the subject of the gossip mill, at once makes a reader connect with her while also creating heightened tension as the reader understands more the stakes. As Lauren's story unfolds, Wendy Corsi Staub alternates point of view, bringing the reader into the thoughts of those whose need for secrecy threaten Lauren and her children. Most chilling of all are those sections when the author allows the reader a peek into the emotions and thoughts of the youngest child Sadie. One empathizes with her while, at the same time, wanting to protect her. Unlike Lauren, the reader knows the danger approaching but not the reason or all the interconnections until the very last page. The ending is perfect! Wendy Corsi Staub brings everything together at the end, yet also leaves the reader with a bone-chilling line, a line that makes this reader most anxious to read the next book, SCARED TO DEATH.

LIVE TO TELL satisfies a reader's craving for rich intricate suspense. LIVE TO TELL is more than a quick action-packed race to the finish. Each moment brings the reader more and more into Lauren's world, and the villain's, creating an intensifying, unnerving, thrilling reading experience. The novel becomes richer and richer as it progresses with the gradual unveiling of the secret as the clock counts down. LIVE TO TELL is several cuts above most of the suspense published today. Simply outstanding!

Courtesy of Book Illuminations

One would think that Wendy Corsi Staub is seven people inhabiting the body of one, writing thrillers and young adult books under her own name while penning women's fiction titles under a pseudonym. What is more impressive than the quantity of her work, however, is its sustained quality. Reading her is akin to watching someone walk a tightrope over Niagara Falls: you wonder how long that person is going to be able to keep doing it without slipping. The answer --- at least in Staub's case --- is not yet, if ever, given that her latest work is one of her best to date.

The MacGuffin that propels LIVE TO TELL is a stuffed pink rabbit that belongs to Sadie Walsh, a four-year-old girl whose parents, Nick and Lauren, have just separated. The rabbit, named Fred, has gone missing after an excursion into New York, possibly in Grand Central Station. Nick, the absent father, is shamed into retrieving Fred from the Grand Central Lost and Found. Though he dutifully makes the effort, he collects the wrong pink stuffed animal. Sounds like a Helen Fuller Orton story, right? Well, it's not. Someone wants the stuffed animal that Sadie now has and will do anything to get it. Secreted within it, you see, is a memory stick that has some extremely interesting background data on a political candidate.

In lesser hands this could have been a comedic novel, but LIVE TO TELL is no comedy, as there is some domestic drama that darkens the picture. Lauren has been summarily dumped by her husband. And --- this is pure genius --- Nick has left her for an older woman. Not much older, but the conventional wisdom is that men of a certain age automatically stray with a (much) younger woman, though the book presents a vastly different and more highly believable scenario. The devastation visited upon Nick and Lauren's two other, older children by Nick's absence is quietly but effectively portrayed as well, even as they go about their lives, unaware that the entire family is being observed with bad intent and in plain sight. And where is the stuffed animal with the goods? Only Sadie knows for sure, and she isn't telling.

LIVE TO TELL, though it stands very well entirely on its own, is the first book of a trilogy that, at least from initial appearances, plays out the thick thread of unintended consequence that radiates bad actions. A preview of the second installment, SCARED TO DEATH (to be published later this year), is included at the end of the novel. It appears that this upcoming book may be even better than the current one. My best advice: read LIVE TO TELL now and wait for the next two volumes. You won't be sorry.

I have read every one of Wendy's books and she out did herself this time and what is so exciting is that I see a sequel in the making. Once again, there were so many mysteries going on at once and so many twists and turns, I thought I might have to take a Dramamine...lol...If you love mystery, suspense and a "cant put it down" book, this is for you. If you are new to Wendy Corsi Staub, pick up her back list...I have never read a bad "Wendy book", Happy reading !!!!

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