Life Sentences is the story of two very different sisters, Daisy and Anna Hubbard.  Daisy is a genetic researcher in a Boston lab devoting all of her time to finding a cure to a rare disease that took the life of their younger brother, Louis.

Anna on the other hand is mentally unbalanced and needs to be kept on anti-psychotic drugs to remain halfway stable.  She has spent most of her life living at home with their mother, Lily, but takes off to California to find a life of her own.  Anna has attempted this in the past and always winds up coming back.

But this time Anna has been gone for a whole ten months and neither Daisy or Lily have heard from her in five weeks when she had been phoning her mother regularly every week.  Now Daisy must go to California, where she hooks up with Detective Jack Makowski, who is investigating several missing persons in the same area. 

In their search they find that Anna was last seen hanging around with Roy Gaines who turns out to be a serial killer.  He is captured and admits to murdering Anna but will only lead them to her gravesite if Daisy goes with them.  They also find out that Roy Gaines is just as obsessed as Daisy is with the disease she is trying to cure however his obsession is quite different from Daisy's.

Life Sentences was quite the page-turner and you did not know from one page to the next where it would lead you or whether Anna was really dead or alive.  The characters were wonderfully written and you could feel their anguish and pain.  I look forward to reading more books by Alice Blanchard.

REVIEWED BY GINA METZ

DO NOT REPRINT WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE REVIEWER, GINA METZ