Lynn Hightower, When Secrets Die

When Secrets Die

Lynn Hightower

Pocket, Oct 2005, $14.00, 352 pp.

ISBN 0743463919

After caring for her son during a traumatic illness that eventually killed him, Emma Marsden is finally coming to terms with her grief. Her world is shattered once again when a call from the Clay's Mill children's clinic that was treating her son informed her that they had some of his organs that they kept for research purposes. When she goes to collect them, the person who called her is under orders not to give them to her. She takes them anyway.

Soon after that incident, Dr. Theodore Turnbridge, her son's doctor, accuses Emma of poisoning her son because she has Munchausen by Proxy. She is in danger of children's protective services taking her fifteen year old daughter away from her and there is the real possibility she might go to jail. She hires private detective Lena Padgett to disprove the charges. Lena, who has an intenseapport with her client, takes the case but it isn't until Emma's daughter is kidnapped does Lena, the police and the medical people have a clue who is behind Emma's legal troubles.

Lynn Hightower is one of the best thriller writers of the new millennium and will appeal to fans of Patricia Cornwell and Nancy Taylor Rosenberg. Readers learn about the power of the medical profession and how in the wrong hands it can ruin the lives of innocent people. Emma is a sympathetic character and readers will empathize with all the problems she has to bear through no fault of her own. Lena plays more of a secondary role then in previous novels in the series but the audience won't feel cheated because she is still a key player in a tense drama.

Harriet Klausner