Look Again

I've enjoyed all of Lisa Scottoline's books, but this is my favorite. The characterization and dialogue is (as always) excellent. The book is filled with heartfelt tension as well as subtle humor. It's a real pageturner - an incredible read!

I loved this book! Couldn't put it down! I was drawn into the story and could really feel what the characters were feeling. I was sorry to see it end. Reading this was a great escape while it lasted!

Reviewed by Narayan Radhakrishnan for RebeccasReads (5/09) The 16th novel by Lisa Scottoline is really, R-E-A-L-L-Y different from the author's previous novels. Firstly, after 15 novels with Harper Collins, Scottoline a.k.a. the female Grisham changes publishers and opts to go with St. Martins; secondly this is a novel that is not a legal thriller, but one which addresses a most complex legal issue; and thirdly, there are no lawyer/judge protagonists in the novel. Having read, relished and enjoyed all Scottoline novels till date, I expected the usual chills and thrills, the ash of suspense laced with wit from Scottoline. But "Look Again" packs an unexpected punch. I never thought I would be describing a Scottoline work as "emotionally charged." Frankly, Lisa Scottoline invades the Jodi Picoult style of popular fiction and presents a unique question of law and morals, for which one can never find a solid and correct answer. Ellen Gleeson is a reporter for a newspaper that just might soon give her the pink slip. She is also the doting mother of Will, her adopted child. However, when a flyer about a missing child catches her attention, the world as she knows it slowly changes. Ellen realizes that the missing child bears an uncanny resemblance to her boy. The reporter in her jumps to action...but the mother in Ellen wants to refrain from opening a can of worms. But the reporter triumphs and Ellen gets in contact with Carol Braverman the mother of the missing Timothy Braverman. What follows is an emotionally charged story, and at the same time an exciting suspenseful story of two women and their rights over a child. A grandiose legal novel...sans a legal thriller, Scottoline's "Look Again" is sure thought provoking and suspensefully disturbing. Highly, highly recommended.

When reporter Ellen Gleeson was doing a story on an abandoned child with a heart defect she fell in love with the boy and when she found out her mother didn't want him, she adopted him. Then one day a couple years later she gets a flyer in the mail with a picture that looks just like Will on it, only it's a child named Timothy Braverman who'd been kidnapped and never found. His parents are offering a million dollar reward and Ellen's heart is beating about a million beats per second. It couldn't be Will, could it? She doesn't want it to be, but she can't let it alone and she starts to put her reporter's skills to use. She finds out the lawyer who handled the adoption has committed suicide. Then Will's supposed real mother dies of a heroin overdose and now Ellen really needs to know what's going on. She flies to Miami, where the Braverman's live, to secretly get DNA samples, a cigarette butt, a saliva sample, anything, so that she can check and see if Will is Tim or not, and we wonder just what she'll do if he is. There is a lot of suspense in this book and Lisa Scottoline keeps ratcheting up the tension, chapter after chapter. And, of course, there's a little romance, but there is fear too and Scottoline know just how to combine the two, how to use emotion to pull her readers into a story. I'm a big reader, but I listened to this on CDs in my car on a long drive from Portland to Los Angeles and it really made the miles disappear. Mary Stuart Masterson is a superb reader, who really does justice to this story. Scottoline and Masterson are really a winning combination. Reviewed by Captain Katie Osborne