December 21, 11.26am
To this point, Lisa Gardner has registered only as one of my panic railway station buys. On that occasion I bought The Killing Hour last year. It was a clever novel, with an ingenious, if somewhat dark premise - that a killer kidnapped pairs of women, murdering one and leaving clues as to the whereabouts of the engdandered second on the corpse. It was fine. Nothing special, but a fair way to pass the time.
I don't suppose I'd given the writer much more thought until a proof of her next novel - Hide, which is due for publication in early 2007 - dropped onto the doormat just as I was putting down Imperium. 
I was hooked roughly 45 second after opening it, and finished it roughly 36 hours later, with only necessary distractions such as work and, to a lesser degree, sleep.
Within Hide is another clever premise - clearly a Gardner trait - two decades ago a family on the run, driven by an over-protective father for reasons that are not revealed. Now the daughter, disturbed but functional, is back in the City (Boston) where it all began and where she reads of her own death in a newspaper.
Her "corpse" is one of six young females found in wet mummified conditions in a hole in the ground on the estate of the City's now closed mental hospital. The young woman, Annabelle Granger, calls the police and instantly becomes immersed in an investigation that spans 20 years and draws together another of creepy strands including a previous case of a young girl kept underground as a sex slave, the deranged scion of a grand Boston family as well as a policeman, Bobby Dodge (a Gardner regular apparently) with his own demons to exorcise.
On at least half a dozen occasions during the book, I thought I had it all figured out, only to discover that Lisa Gardner is far too clever a writer to allow a dim reader like myself a glimpse into the final pages at an early stage. So many twists, so very deftly handled are a measure of her skill as a storyteller, and that appears to be her greatest gift. Hide rattles along at a very satisfying pace, taking to pause to catch up with history when necessary, racing away with the present-day plot when appropriate.
The background was chosen carefully and painted skilfully also. There is something inherently disturbing about mental institutions, and Ms Gardner very cleverly constructs a haunting worse-case-scenario in hers. Similarly, there is something so everyday about the suburban lifestyle from which one of the victims is hoisted away that it will send a shiver down the spine of every parent who reads it (just as it did mine).
My first brush with Gardner left me a little cold, but the overwhelming feeling with this one was "chilling".