Tear Me Apart

Starred review from July 9, 2018
At the start of this outstanding domestic thriller from bestseller Ellison (Lie to Me), 17-year-old Mindy Wright, a championship skier who’s on track to qualify for the U.S. Olympic team, breaks her leg in a downhill race in Vail, Colo. At the local hospital, the girl’s parents, Jasper and Lauren Wright, are at first hopeful that their daughter will be able to ski again. But healing from the injury becomes the least of Mindy’s worries when doctors discover that she has leukemia and is desperately in need of a stem cell transplant. The pressure grows on her seemingly perfect family as her physicians are unable to find a stem cell match. DNA tests show that Lauren, who’s hiding some big secrets, is not her biological mother. Meanwhile, Mindy’s older sister, a DNA tech with the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, does some digging and comes up with a startling match with Mindy’s DNA. The intense plot, enhanced by flashbacks that gradually reveal the truth of Mindy’s birth, builds to a stunning conclusion. Ellison is at the top of her game. Agent: Scott Miller, Trident Media Group.

August 15, 2018
While bed-bound in the hospital, an athletic young woman discovers the gruesome truth about her mother.This novel, a thriller set in 2018, is well-paced and creative. When Olympics-bound 17-year-old skier Mindy takes a fall on the slopes and brutally breaks her leg, it sets in motion a series of events that will forever change her family as she knows it. Running tests before conducting surgery on the broken leg, the doctors find that Mindy has cancer and will need a stem-cell transplant. When neither of her parents are a match for the procedure, not even genetically, the truth comes out--although in parts, slowly, and ever more incriminatingly. Mindy's mother, Lauren, is not who she has convinced her family she is, and even Lauren's sister, a blood-lab technician working for the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, is shocked by what comes to light. When the lab finds Mindy's biological father, who has been living with the assumption that his daughter was kidnapped when his wife was brutally murdered 17 years ago, Lauren will go to great lengths to shield her secret and protect Mindy. The forward motion of the novel is intermittently interrupted by letters exchanged in the early 1990s between Vivian and Liesel, two unknown characters, which serves to heighten the thrill. Although the ending is somewhat predictable, the dialogue often trite, and the emotional exchanges simplistic, the action keeps the reader at attention. Ellison seems to want to shed light on problems of mental health and the terrible consequences that result when the emotional balance is neglected.An inventive thriller with a horrifying reveal and a happy ending.

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Starred review from August 1, 2018
Seventeen-year-old skiing phenom Mindy Wright's broken leg leads to a web of deceit and crime that spans decades. Blood work done after the compound fracture shows that Mindy has an aggressive form of leukemia. When chemo fails to help, a stem-cell transfer is considered Mindy's best hope, but DNA testing shows that neither her parents nor her mother's sister, Dr. Juliet Ryder, lab manager for the Colorado Bureau of Investigation (CBI), are a match for her. Learning for the first time that Lauren had adopted Mindy privately, Juliet breaks CBI rules in her haste to find a donor match for her increasingly ill niece. The secrets that Lauren had kept from everyone are hinted at in interspersed letters from the 1990s, as Juliet's investigative work links to a still-unsolved 2000 murder case in which a woman was found dead in her home and her newborn baby vanished. As she spools out a fast-moving plot, Ellison also makes the case for treating depression like any physical disease. A compelling story with a moving message.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)