A review by erinecarroll
Live to Tell by Wendy Corsi Staub

5.0

I stayed up late reading this because I could not put it down! I had to finish it. I loved this book from beginning to end. I always enjoy books from multiple view points! The characters were all relatable and real.

Spoiler

The story starts out with a man (Byron) running from the police but it also seems as though he is running from someone else as well, someone who wants what he has and will kill him for it. Byron needs to hide what he has because it is very important and if it ends up in the wrong hands it would be very bad. As he is running along the streets of NY he grabs a pink stuffed dog from a little girl in the stroller and stuffs the flashdrive that he is hiding into the fur of the dog and leaves it at the lost and found of Grand Central so he can come for it later. At the same time a little girl named Sadie Walsh notices that her favorite pink stuffed animal that she has had from birth is missing. Sadie's mom (Lauren) urges Sadie's father (Nick) to go to Grand Central on his way home from work and check the lost and found. He does and returns with a pink stuffed toy but it is not the pink rabbit that Sadie lost..its the pink dog that has the flash drive in it. Basically a political figure wanting to become a governor is hiding a huge secret from his family and it is on this flash drive. This flash drive could make/break him. He orders his aide (Beverly, with whom he is having an affair) to find this stuffed dog no matter what the cost (even if it comes to hurting a child). Along the way multiple people are killed and hurt. The secret was that Quinn tracked down his illegitimate sun who was given up for adoption 7 years earlier and kidnapped him in order to do stem cell surgery for his toddler age daughter who was dying of a rare blood disease. He took the surgery over to India to do it so his wife would not find out, and ordered his aide to kill the child after the surgery was over (he could leave no witnesses.) Beverly was unable to kill a child but still reported back that she did. The flash drive contained this information and would ruin Quinn because not only did he kidnap this child and leave him in India as well as leave his family behind mourning him and not knowing what really happened it him, but he is a republican and was running as "anti-stem cell, anti-medical tourism, and anti-savior sibling, all things that he did 13 years earlier. The book ended with an epilogue of Jeremy (now 20 years old) in Texas seeing the coverage of the scandal on a TV in a bar...

Needless to say I loved this book and can't wait to start the second one!