Book review: Look Again by Lisa Scottoline

I purchased Look Again by Lisa Scottoline in March, hoping it would be a book club selection. My wish came true in August! The 373 pages of the 5x7" paperback-like novel did not disappoint.

The book poses the question, what would you do if the face in a missing child photo was your son's?

After she received the postcard in the mail and sees the uncanny similarities, journalist Ellen Gleeson can't let the thought go even though she knows that the adoption of her son was legal. She recalls visiting the hospital every day for another story and seeing the little one year old boy recovering from heart surgery with no family members around to support him. She looks into his beautiful blue eyes, falls in love, and adopts him.

Fast forward two years to the cold winter morning she received the postcard in the mail. From that day forward, she couldn't let go of the fact that the child in the postcard looked a lot like her three year old son, despite the fact that the child in the postcard was a computerized composite-aged sketch. To find out more about the woman who gave up her son for adoption, Ellen contacted the lawyer who drew up the adoption papers only to discover she had committed suicide soon after the adoption was finalized.

Ellen hits another dead-end in her attempt to find out if her son Will is really the kidnapped boy Timothy from the postcard when her next lead suddenly dies of a suspicious overdose. Ellen takes things into her own hands and flies to the missing boy's hometown and essentially stalks the boy's grief-stricken parents in an attemot to somehow get DNA smaples from them without their knowledge.

All of this is happening as the newspaper for which she works is laying people off because of the economy, and she and her handsome single Latin editor deny their feelings for one another.

Her search for the truth endangers her life and that of her son's. There are a couple of surprising twists in the storyline, although one of the "surprises" was predictable. But in this case, I'll let it slide.

Look Again brings up many good questions, and is a novel that will leave a parent thinking for a long, long time.