Lisa Scottolines Most Wanted: A nail-biting story that asks, What would you do?
In novel after novel, Lisa Scottoline has proved herself a master of stories that combine familial love — especially that of mothers for their children — with nail-biting stories of spirited everywomen bent on finding the truth. Her new novel, "Most Wanted," demonstrates again her skill with this kind of domestic suspense tale.
The book centers on Christine and Marcus Nilsson, a couple happily pregnant with their first child. After years of struggling with Marcus’s infertility, they opted to become a family using sperm procured from a nationally respected sperm bank. Their happiness goes south when Christine sees a CNN report about the arrest of “The Nurse Murderer,” who is believed to have killed women in Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia.
Christine is positive that the man, Zachary Jeffcoat, is sperm Donor 3319, the blond, blue-eyed medical student she and Marcus chose to help them build their family. This forces the Nilssons — and readers — to face some provocative questions. What would you do if you were carrying the baby of a sociopathic murderer? Would you abort? Is the baby, if you keep it, destined to inherit the father’s bad genes? Could you love the baby knowing its father is a killer?
But this isn't a scary story designed to evoke images of the devil's spawn like the one Ira Levin conjured in "Rosemary's Baby." Neither is it similar to the story of Rhoda Penmark, the 8-year-old serial killer in William March's unsettling 1954 novel "The Bad Seed." What "Most Wanted" does have in common with these stories is a mother's steadfast love for her child.
Like many of the women who populate Scottoline’s imagined worlds, Christine dons the mantle of a modern-day Nancy Drew and uses moxie and legwork to ferret out the truth about the biological father of her unborn child. That her ego-bruised husband turns his back on her and she places her life and that of her baby in danger only add to this novel’s tantalizing narrative.
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As always, Scottoline’s gift to her readers is that she places everyday, good people in sensational but not impossible situations — is it so hard to imagine that a sperm donor would lie about his identity? — and then gives them the grit to fight their way to resolution and some universal truth. In this case, Christine’s lesson is as old as the planet, yet ageless in its relevance. Even before Christine gets to the bottom of the story about Donor 3319, her mother tells her: “Your baby, whether it’s a boy or a girl, or whatever it is, it’s going to sit right here and we’re going to love it to pieces.” What would you do? Scottoline’s irresistible story makes you wonder.
Memmott’sreviews also appear in the Chicago Tribune and the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
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most wanted
By Lisa Scottoline
St. Martin’s. 438 pp. $27.99
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