SAY GOODBYE by Lisa Gardner: Its prologue is a clue to what is to come

Lisa Gardner’s SAY GOODBYE begins with a sex scene between a slutty girl and a high school football star. You’re safe in assuming that Chapter 1 and the next several chapters aren’t any better.

There’s a female FBI agent who’s called in the middle of the night because a prostitute in the custody of a local police department, a prostitute the FBI agent has never met, who has nothing to do with any case the FBI agent has been assigned, is demanding to speak with her. So the FBI agent goes there at 3 a.m.

So far, how hard is this to swallow?

By the way, the prostitute has spider tattoos. Spiders mean something. And the FBI agent is taking seriously what the prostitute told her.

And there’s a little boy who is snatched from his home in the middle of the night by a pervert. If you like reading about child molestation, you’ll like these parts.

And there’s a very old but fit woman who used to care for foster children and now sees and speaks to the ghosts of her dead family members. A little boy shows up occasionally.

And there’s a man who keeps spiders as pets. He’s a bad guy, of course. Is he the pervert who molests that little boy?

When I got to the part where the pervert makes the little boy bring the pervert an even littler boy, I couldn’t continue. Gardner isn’t graphic. But she lets you know what’s going on, and she describes the screams. Call me squeamish, but the thought of 9-year old and 4-year-old boys trapped by a pervert makes me sick.

Because I didn’t read more, I can’t really say, but there were hints that the situation with the pervert and the 9-year-old boy turns into something like a case that was in the news a year or so ago when a man kidnapped a boy, and the boy ended up moving about freely yet felt he had to continue living with that man. That was an interesting case, so maybe that's why SAY GOODBYE got the good review I read.

However, a reader shouldn’t have to hate the first half of a book in order to get to a good second half.