St Martin’s Press, 2010
This is one of a series featuring Bennie Rosato, head of an all-female law firm in Philadelphia. Most books in this series are mysteries, with a strong cast of characters and a lot of time spent on romantic and family relationships, sometimes at the expense of the mystery. But, overall, I find the books enjoyable because the characters are robust and the romantic and family dramas are interesting. This one, Think Twice, is a bit unusual in that there really isn’t a mystery. It probably should be classified as suspense.
The plot, basically, is that Bennie’s identical twin – an evil doppelganger named Alice Connelly – tries to kill Bennie, assume her identity for a few days and steal all her assets – over 3 million dollars. She, of course, almost gets away with it, but not quite.
I enjoyed the book, but I enjoy good mysteries more, so it being suspense rather than mystery did not elevate it in my esteem. I also didn’t buy the way Bennie escaped being buried alive. In a situation which should have killed her in a matter of a few hours, Bennie seems to have survived for over a day, then she had to battle a coyote to get out of her grave. Meanwhile Alice was assuming her identity so well that no one at her office, or any of her clients, detected the substitution. Even more unbelievable was that Bennie’s ex-boyfriend returns unexpectedly and resumes the interrupted romance, thinking that Alice is Bennie.
Finally one of the lawyers at the office begins to suspect something is amiss, but not because Alice was a dolt at law, but because a crazy woman from Italy who claimed superhuman powers identified Alice as an “evil woman.”
Lisa Scottoline is a skilled author who knows how to relate a tale. But this tale was too much of a stretch for me.
5 out of 10