Being a parent is difficult enough when dealing with the usual challenges, such as surviving a colicky infant or teaching a teenager to drive. (Seriously, either of these could be the subject of a decent thriller. Truly frightening.) But what happens when you add in the professional stress of, say, investigating a murder?
While No Bad Deed’s Cassie Larkin works as a veterinarian, not in law enforcement, she’s dealing with her own work-related stress when the novel opens. After another long day at the clinic, Cassie has missed dinner with her kids—again—and she’s ignoring her husband’s calls. On her way home, she witnesses a man and woman fighting on the side of the road. A caretaker by nature and training, of course Cassie stops to help. Still, her first thought (and the novel’s first line) is: If my kids had been with me, it wouldn’t have happened. Cassie’s instinct throughout the book is a universal one: Protect your children from the big, bad world.
But what about parents whose job it is to navigate that big, bad world every day? How does a detective or assistant district attorney raise a child while also solving crimes—especially when it’s their own children at risk? Here are six novels where those fighting injustice also happen to be parents.
Hush Hush, Laura Lippman
In the twelfth book in the series, Baltimore private investigator Tess Monaghan now drives a minivan named Gladys. Tess is in total mom mode here: coaxing three-year-old Carla Scout to eat organic fish tacos and enduring Tasmanian Devil-level meltdowns. (Carla Scout steals every scene she’s in.) So when Tess is hired by the wealthy Melisandre Harris Dawes, notorious for having killed her own child, Tess is understandably uneasy. Melisandre is making a documentary about her case, and wants to reconnect with her now teenage daughters. In Hush, Hush, parental guilt is on full display—both Tess’s and Melisandre’s—as is the transformative nature of motherhood, for good and ill.
Nine Dragons, Michael Connelly
L.A. police detective Harry Bosch can be single-minded in his pursuit of the bad guys. He also happens to live in a house on stilts that’s one landslide away from relocating farther down the hillside. Not the most kid-friendly environment. Still, Harry’s relationship with daughter Madelaine (Maddie) is one of the reasons to read the books. In many of Connelly’s novels, Maddie is relegated to the background. But in Nine Dragons, she’s front and center. While investigating the killing of a Chinese-American convenience store owner, Maddie disappears in Hong Kong, where her mom (and Harry’s ex) Eleanor lives. In one “blink and you might miss it” moment that showcases his softer side, Harry catches the scent of the missing Maddie’s shampoo on a pillow. There are some heartbreaking moments in this one.
Vanish, Tess Gerritsen
The fifth installment of the popular Rizzoli and Isles series opens with Detective Jane Rizzoli very pregnant and not at all sure she’s ready to become a mom. Naturally, Jane’s labor turns out to be as complicated as her feelings surrounding her impending motherhood. While in the courtroom, her water breaks—during an attempt to subdue a defendant no less—and Jane ends up hospitalized. There, she’s taken hostage by a nameless young woman who had earlier ended up in Dr. Maura Isles’ morgue—though she was not, in fact, dead.
Defending Jacob, William Landay
In this legal thriller, Assistant District Attorney Andy Barber has the respect of his colleagues and a happy domestic life with his wife, Laurie, and their teen son. Then one of Jacob’s classmates is stabbed to death, and Jacob is accused in the crime. The court scenes are realistic and riveting, but it is Andy’s unshakeable defense of his son, and the family’s slow disintegration, that are the emotional core of the story. The chapter Argentina and the climax are standouts in this regard.
Never Tell, Lisa Gardner
This list wouldn’t be complete without Boston homicide sergeant detective D.D. Warren, who might’ve been voted “least likely to be a mom” back at the police academy. But the crisis present-day D.D. faces at the start of Never Tell? Trying to get her shoe back from the family’s new rescue pup, with the help of husband Alex and five-year-old son Jack. But this being a Lisa Gardner book, of course there’s also a murder. D.D. (with help from confidential informant Flora Dane) is working the case of a pregnant woman, Evelyn Carter, arrested in her husband’s fatal shooting. The problem is that when she was 16, Evelyn’s father was also shot and killed. Back then, the shooting was deemed accidental. But was it? Though D.D. has evolved over the course of many (excellent) novels, she retains her characteristic edge, as a detective and as a mom.
American Spy, Lauren Wilkinson
Despite the risks inherent in her career, Marie Mitchell has always wanted to be a mom. (The novel is framed as a letter for her young twin sons, and at one point she tells them: I’d been waiting for you my whole life.) As this spy thriller begins, Marie experiences a universal parental moment: She steps on a Lego. But a not-so-universal moment quickly follows when an intruder tries to kill Marie with her sons in the house. This doesn’t go well for the gunman. The plot centers on Cold War intrigue, but through its shifting timeline, it also shows how Marie developed those complicated feelings around family, patriotism, and love.
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