Here’s something funny: as evidenced by a thousand hammy postcards and Live Laugh Love-adjacent signs, Love you to the moon and back is a term of endearment in English. In Dutch, however, if you want to tell someone to fuck off, you tell them to walk to the moon. I’m not sure what that says about us as a people, but I was reminded of the duality by Gardner’s Love You More. Not because it involves either linguistics of astronomy, but because there’s an inherent duality in the genre: do we, as readers, want something that may be realistic but also mundane and predictable, or do we prefer the outlandish at the cost of credibility?
Love You More is the umpteenth part in a complex web of intersecting series by Lisa Gardner. It features stalwart D.D. Warren, whose entire personality can be summed up as ‘irritable’ even after many, many installments. It’s the first book to feature Tessa Leoni, state trooper cum private eye. Warren is called out to investigate the death of Brian Darby, who ostensibly has been shot by his long-suffering wife. Tessa is covered in bruises, but the initial story – that she is the victim of spousal abuse and has killed her husband out of self-defense – falls through pretty quickly. And where is Sophie, Tessa’s six year old daughter?
This is my fourth Gardner book. I love Karin Slaughter and there’s a significant overlap in the venn diagram for people who like both authors (though, curiously, they seem to be entirely out of each other’s network), but I’m honestly not sure why I keep picking up her books. I liked one of them; I abjectly hated another, and the other two were decidedly middle of the road. I’m not entirely sure why she doesn’t do it for me. Maybe it’s the prose that falls weirdly flat (though in her defense, the translation I had wasn’t great and I’ve never read her in her original lingo), or the uneven pacing. Maybe it’s the characterisations; sometimes, she lucks out and has an interesting character, but most of the time they’re just there to serve the plot. It almost seems like she tries to add more oomph sometimes, but then it just gets in the way of the plot and she ends up ignoring whatever she came up with.
Which brings me to the second issue. The book is ingeniously crafted. It kept me guessing for a fairly long time, even if the big villain reveal was predictable. In that sense, Gardner has done an admirable job, and she did her research (even if some of the plot points seem a little hard to believe with what I know of these things, but I’m not an expert, so I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt there). The problem is that the plot also requires Leoni to think ahead so much, plan for every contingency, improvise successfully under so much stress that it’s a little heavy handed. Is it fun to read? Yes, but I hate that authors seem to think that the best plot is an outlandish one. Nevertheless it did make me want to keep reading.
There are some authors who manage to straddle the line between crime fiction and literature. Donna Tartt’s The Secret History is probably the gold standard. Tana French usually manages to come up with ingenious storylines full of well-rounded characters (we won’t speak of The Likeness). Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series is fun without the ludicrous plot twists. Gardner never really gets there. When she’s good, her books are an engaging read, but there’s always something about her novels that I end up not enjoying. Most of the time that starts with D.D. Warren, who is angry and annoyed and always seems weirdly ready to jump to conclusions at any point. And I hate that her name is D.D. For crying out loud, give her a name, not an abbreviation.