Friday, February 10, 2012 11:38 AM

Detective DD Warren, heroine of a Boston-set crime series by Lisa Gardner, was probably born multitasking (Breathe – check. Cry – check. Coolly appraise the situation – check.) First-time motherhood to a 10-week-old son hasn’t put a dent in her professional stride, and in an early scene we watch her turn her attention fluidly from a messy crime scene to the perplexing case of Charlene (Charlie) Grant, who demands DD’s help to solve Charlie’s own impending murder.

 

You read correctly. Catch Me’s premise is that Charlie will soon befall the same fate as that of her best friends, Randi and Jackie, both strangled in their homes. A 28-year-old lone-wolf emergency dispatch operator and survivor of a catastrophic early childhood, Charlie met her friends when rescued by her aunt at age eight and taken to rural New Hampshire. Though they spent little time together as adults, the women remained Charlie’s only friends, and she is horrified when Randi is murdered, apparently by her violent ex-husband.

 

Jackie’s murder exactly one year later, on January 21, excludes the ex-husband but admits the possibility – certainty, in Charlie’s mind – that the deaths were caused by someone known to all three women, and that Charlie is next. The first anniversary of Jackie’s death is just four days away, and Charlie has spent the past year preparing her defence, training in body combat and shooting with an ex-Marine sniper. She fully expects to die, but intends to go down swinging, and tells DD she will gather all the forensic evidence she can for a future crime-scene investigation.

 

DD has seen enough both to take Charlie’s assertions seriously and to call for more intel on this mysterious young woman. The background check is delegated to colleagues as DD’s skills are required on a bloodier front: near the scene of DD and Charlie’s meeting, a paedophile who met and groomed his victims via internet gaming boards was gunned down in his home, and he isn’t to be the last. While she hunts for the killer-with-a-cause, DD dwells with dread on the looming visit of her disapproving mother and emasculating father. The subplot is promising, but in the event tepid and unnecessary, serving only to distract from the narrative action and the more interesting dynamic between DD and her partner, Alex, who rises nobly to the challenge of virtual single parenthood.

 

Presumably he knows that his companion is constructed of different material to the rest of the human species. Apart from a brief and mild episode of what is usually referred to as ‘baby brain’, DD shows no sign of having recently produced an infant. Admittedly, she never sleeps, but she doesn’t appear to miss it.

 

Charlie is made of similarly stern stuff, and Gardner does a good job, as the narrative flickers unsteadily between Charlie’s first-person perspective and the omniscient form, of proposing that she may be unreliable. Could the daughter of a severely mentally ill woman share some of her mother’s traits?

 

Catch Me’s finest features are its two tough heroines and opaque trajectory – though we recognize the red herrings as they are tossed, that doesn’t lead us any closer to the truth. But from the start, we can be sure DD will prevail.