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See How She Dies

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London Danvers was kidnapped as a child from her wealthy family. Over the years, many women have claimed to be the long-lost heiress. Now Adria Nash has arrived in Oregon, claiming to be London - but she's different. She knows personal details only London could have known. And there is someone who does believe her . . . who is watching her every move, waiting to see how she runs, how she screams, and how she dies.

510 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2004

1542 people are currently reading
8530 people want to read

About the author

Lisa Jackson

271 books9,572 followers
Lisa Jackson is the number-one New York Times bestselling author of over ninety-five novels, including the Rick Bentz and Reuben Montoya Series, the Pescoli and Alvarez Series, the Savannah series, and numerous stand alone novels. She also is the co-author of One Last Breath, Last Girl Standing, and the Colony Series, written with her sister and bestselling author Nancy Bush, as well as the collaborative novels Sinister and Ominous, written with Nancy Bush and Rosalind Noonan. There are over thirty million copies of her novels in print and her writing has been translated into twenty languages.

Before she became a nationally bestselling author, she was a mother struggling to keep food on the table by writing novels, hoping against hope that someone would pay her for them. Today, neck deep in murder, her books appear on The New York Times, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly national bestseller lists.

With dozens of bestsellers to her name, Lisa Jackson is a master of taking readers to the edge of sanity—and back—in novels that buzz with dangerous secrets and deadly passions. She continues to be fascinated by the minds and motives of both her killers and their pursuers—the personal, the professional, and the downright twisted. As she builds the puzzle of relationships, actions, clues, lies, and personal histories that haunt her protagonists, she must also confront the fear and terror faced by her victims and the harsh and enduring truth that, in the real world, terror and madness touch far too many lives and families.

Visit http://www.LisaJackson.com where you can find a Media Kit with photos and more information.

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5 stars
2,143 (35%)
4 stars
1,910 (31%)
3 stars
1,274 (21%)
2 stars
493 (8%)
1 star
233 (3%)
Displaying 1 - 30 of 336 reviews
Profile Image for Brodiebert.
179 reviews
July 27, 2019
You know it's bad when you are composing the bad review in your head while you are still listening to it.

The only good thing about this book was that I didn't know 'who dun it?' until the end, that's the only thing that kept me hanging on.

SPOILERS AHEAD

Full of plot holes
-they can't do a DNA test to see if she is London because the parents are dead, yet the siblings are alive and kicking, so they could have easily checked them. Also if you're going to leave millions in a will for someone, wouldn't you maybe leave a DNA sample so you can confirm them if they appear?

-heiress is kidnapped by nanny, nanny can't be found despite years of searching, then they find her within a week of London appearing and she's still using the same name! Seriously how did she dissappear? millions at your disposal and you can't find a woman who didn't even bother to change her name?

Finally the worst part, the ICK FACTOR, there is nothing romantic about a half brother and sister getting it on -gag. She tries to make it okay cause maybe he's a bastard, but wouldn't you want to maybe wait and find out before having sex with someone who is potentially your HALF BROTHER?? I knew that she would somehow find out that they weren't related by blood by the end of the book, yet that didn't make it any less icky, cause the characters don't know that, it's hard to root for characters that are knowingly committing incest!

I feel like I need therapy after reading this drivel.
Profile Image for Barbara ★.
3,510 reviews286 followers
April 23, 2015
The fact that the hero (yeah right) had sex with his step mother just grossed me out. The added fact that he also knowingly had sex with his step-sister (same father) was just too much for me. I just couldn't get past the yuck factor though the author tried to get past this fact in the last chapter. LAME!!!

And don't even get me started on Nelson, Jason and Trisha. What a bunch of money-grubbing assholes. Not a likable on in the entire bunch. They got exactly what they deserved though twenty years too late.
Profile Image for Patricia (Irishcharmer) Yarian.
364 reviews15 followers
January 26, 2021
So, here's what I thought....this was not what I expected! I tried,I really did to boost it to 5 stars -but just couldn't . Actually,I do believe this is a rewrite..as I know I've read it before..like back in the 90's, and this is just different. Just can't put my finger on it tho'!
The family dynamic is still there! The dysfunctionality of it, and all the warts.!!but this version just seems hmmph...like cleaned up a bit..
Sure some may not be comfortable with how relationships are portrayed, or the betrayals or promises made and broken....or the wanting of forbidden fruits. Even tho she twines it thru the story, the whole story gets drawn out and starts to get boring and you get to the "yeah,yeah,yeah just move will ya'!" Stage.
Will say, it's just a bit long and repetitive and probably should've been edited better. I like Lisa J -so yes, I'm comfortable giving 4stars. But would I tell you "hey, go get this at Barnes n Nobles -nah ...but perhaps at the library or even at a tag sale...then pick it up. I believe this is not one of her best (I call it my bit of "dark fluff" )..
Had to go look...what I read way back when was a 1994 release this one is 2004....what a difference a decade makes!😉 ----P/
Profile Image for Nancy.
778 reviews
October 30, 2017
Yuck. How is this rated so high. Narrator good but story is just so weird and unbelievable. And Judy yuck. Gave up around 60%.
Profile Image for Kerri.
125 reviews1 follower
Read
November 21, 2011
I just finished reading this umm *what is the polite way to say effing disgusting sh##* incestuous filth. Hey I'll take a good old erotic romance any day but no I cannot take a book where the main love story is whether these almost definitely legal brother and sister (though perhaps not blood related) should give into baser urges. Hold on one sec while I puke.
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Er right, where was I? FAMILY RELATIONS HAVING RELATIONS IS WRONG!!!!

I don't wanna go miss manners on your ass but come on!

And that's not even the worst of it? COME ON ADRIA, HE SLEPT WITH YOUR MOTHER, WHILE SHE WAS MARRIED TO YOUR LEGAL (and his biological) FATHER!

See How She Dies is actually a great read if you want a socially amoral phsycologically damaging experience. I personally wasn't looking for that.

Aside from the main grossness of the book I found many a fault. I thought the suspense was missing. There were only ever half stories told, for instance we knew why Trisha was so bitchy but we didn't hear her story end. Nelson, pfft, hardly any story there, and his twist was so untwisted and predictable it was straight.

Base line was that this story was 1) Gross 2) Predictable 3) Boring 4) Not Worth Reading.

Horrible. Just horrible.
Profile Image for Melissa.
1,408 reviews95 followers
February 17, 2020
Not the book I remember. There was a lot of mystery, but most of it could have been avoided had there been a REAL investigation THEN. London goes missing, they search with no success, the parents die, time passes, Adria learns she might be London, Adria searches for the truth, gets death threats, fall in love with her possible half brother Zach, and the truth is revealed. Whew! You know, DNA testing is a thing that could be done to tell if Adria is related to Zach. Is there a reason they didn't do that? Besides taboo suspense. This was very drama filled for drama sake. Boo! Narration was good though.
Profile Image for MuchAdo.
39 reviews6 followers
June 30, 2014
(the identity of the villain is not revealed. Spoilers concern more the 'convtroversial' -for some- relationships in the book)
I must say that I find all those 'outraged' reviews really really amusing. For I always thought that one reads RS for the darkness and the ambiguity, and for having a peek into the forbidden, the repressed, the unconfessed. If you don't want the darkness of sexual desire to drive the story, then don't read (or write in) the genre. There are plenty of straightforward thrillers, or 'inspirational' romances, where the dark paths of desire are neither explored nor represented. So you'll be perfectly safe. The same applies to all those romances that are supposedly about bad boys (or bad girls) but they are, in terms of semantic content (not in the sense of descriptive sexual scenes) total vanilla. Innocuous and boring as hell.

I've read the revised version of LJ's 'See How She Dies' and I could tell that the original one was much more ambiguous about the blood relation between Zach and Adria. Thankfully the other forbidden relation (between an adolescent Zach and his stepmother) was not eliminated. There are frequent inserts very early on about the cloud over Zach's paternity that, I'm convinced, were not there in the original. I can only guess that LJ came under pressure from the blandnes-and-cardboard brigade to draw clear demarcating lines. Despite all that, the book still gives us a grippingly dysfunctional family. The five stars of this review are my way of praising the gloriously disturbed and disturbing Danvers family. Lisa Jackson draws a very vivid, convincing and engrossing family portrait full of alienation and self-alienation. She also handles the individual portraits very well too. For example, Zach at 17 feels like a young boy and the mature Zach like a man grown into his cynical skin. This is true for the other characters, central and peripheral, too. Even those who died before the 'present' time of the story are well drawn (Kat's despair and brokeness, her downfall, and the patriarch Witt's hubris and violence, all very well done). The shifts and different registers of a character lend the book a nice and intriguing modulation, and make one realise that we don't see that anymore in more recently published RS, where everyone and everything feels flat if not downright annoying, written according to strictly defined theme-formulas (thus only villains, or those murdered early on, are allowed to sleep with their stepmothers or women who can prove to be their sisters, never the main characters),and the cartoonish violence is thrown in in spades to compensate , supposedly, for the lack of writing skills and the lack of real engagement with the darker side of decent characters. Thus manichean readerships push RS writers into espousing a manichean horizon, one that never suited and never will suit this genre.

Lisa Jackson's book presents us with an exciting canvass of a privileged family whose members are individually and collectively drowning in broken promises, betrayals, failures and disappointments. Watching them all flailing about (even those who appear to be in control...control of what?) was far more interesting than who did what to whom. Recommended to all those who don't have a comfort zone, or, if they do, are stil more interested in books who push them out of it.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Profile Image for Sandra Jackson - Alawine.
1,023 reviews13 followers
February 27, 2014
Possibly one of the stupidest plots ever. Adria Nash shows up claiming to be London Danvers who was kidnapped from her very wealth family as a child.

Her half-siblings of course are convinced she is yet another fake even though she bears a strong resemblance to their Step-Mother Kat. Jason (the eldest) hires a private detective to dig up dirt on Adria and uncover the truth. And Zach and Adria fall deeply in love with each other, which is sickening since Adria is suppose to be his HALF-SISTER.

No DNA testing is done supposedly because Kat and Wit Danvers (London's parents) are dead. Apparently the fact that London has 4 half-siblings and a test on the siblings could establish a shared paternity doesn't occur to anyone, event he lovers Adria and Zach (steamy sex scenes).

The person who had Adria kidnapped meanwhile tries to drive her away with threats and finally a physical attack. Eventually the PI uncovers London's nanny (who disappeared the night of the kidnapping) and the fact that Adria really is London. Before Ginny Slade (the nanny) can be taken into custody she is killed. Adria realizes that is was Zach's mother Eunice who attacked her. While Eunice admits to paying Ginny to kidnap London and killing Kat she denies killing Ginny. Adria and Zach go to the Danvers yact to be alone. They are confronted by Jason who is determined to eliminate London. Jason pushes Zach overboard and London jumps in after him. Zack manages to get to shore and Jason is arrested for the murder of Ginny Slade. London is presumed dead.

Now to make it all nice and neat so the half siblings aren't committing incest and can live happily ever after. The PI uncovers that Wit Danvers was impotent and that Kat snuck off and had artificial insemination to conceive. He phones Zack with the news and then London/Aria appears and falls into Zach's arms.
Profile Image for Steve Center.
472 reviews3 followers
November 30, 2017
This book is a romance novel. A cheesy romance masquerading as a suspense thriller.
Profile Image for Lindsey.
167 reviews1 follower
February 27, 2018
Oh my. While this was probably not the worst book I've ever read, and I did actually finish it - I just couldn't handle the plot line. It was like a bad 70s/80s soap opera that has jumped the shark. I mean, the love interests are potentially brother and sister!!! Seriously, in a real situation like that you most certainly would WAIT until you knew for sure whether you were brother and sister or not before you fall in love with each other. Beyond weird. Beyond.
And I guessed the "bad guy"/s right away. Again, I could see this playing out on All My Children or something. Or Passions - that was always a weird one.
Profile Image for Terri ♥ (aka Mrs. Christian Grey).
1,528 reviews482 followers
Want to read
February 16, 2019
Yeah, this book wasn’t for me. I couldn’t get passed the lustful looks and thoughts of two people who thought they might be half brother and sister. Whether they end up being so or not, they believe they are. Yet their thoughts never stray from wanting each other sexually.

Additionally there is no way they couldn’t perform DNA test using the siblings. Blatant disregard of facts to create a soap opera worthy plot was yet another reason to DNF.

Not for me.
Profile Image for Emily.
319 reviews108 followers
April 23, 2020
**Goodreads giveaway win**

This is a 200 page book disguised as a 500 page book. The repetitive dialogue and thoughts are painful. And the angst! Oh the angst. There was potential in the plot but it's mowed over by cliched conversations and over-wrought adverbs. And then the absurd ending. I'll also give Lisa Jackson some credit for getting Portland geography correct. Otherwise this book gets a nope from me.
Profile Image for Emily.
5,866 reviews546 followers
June 22, 2023
Four year old London Danvers was at her fathers birthday party and disappeared with her nanny. Rewards were offered, pleas to bring her back were left unheard and unchanged for over twenty years. Now Adria Nash has arrived in Portland, Oregon looking for answers. A deathbed confession has her wondering if she is indeed London. She is met with resistance though head on with three potential brothers and a venomous sister. Despite their effort to drive her off, she is determined to find out the truth which puts her in danger.

Zachary Danvers, the black sheep of the family can't stay away from London. She looks like her mothers twin but she has confidence about her that is left unmatched. He doubts she is London but as she begins to uncover the past Zach begins to question everything he knows. Will they figure out who is trying to kill London or will it be too late?

This was page turning suspense until the end. The end is a bit abrupt in a sense and had me asking questions about the aftermath. I thought the story was clever, figured out one part right away but also had a surprise twist that I didn't see coming.
Profile Image for Ash.
7 reviews
December 29, 2017
It took me a while to finish this and I really only enjoyed the ending and beginning out of the whole book. However, even the parts I enjoyed were a little forced. I found the middle of the book so damn boring, it was a struggle to keep reading. I know it’s not how the story goes but I feel like Adria did have options for paternity tests even through using any of the other Danvers’ DNA.

I felt like things just jumped around a little too much and I definitely got tired of reading about Adria and Zach wanting what they couldn’t have. The pining over each other got really old pretty quickly for me.

If I was to recommend this book, I probably wouldn’t. I’m also not totally sure if I would want to attempt another Lisa Jackson book. Maybe some of her other books are better but, as a first shot, I’m not overly impressed.
Profile Image for Rachel Lowisz.
23 reviews3 followers
January 3, 2018
This book had a very original plot, but that’s where the good parts of the story end. To try and make finishing the book more bearable, I made up a drinking game. Take a shot any time:
- the word “sensual” is used
- the author uses a word incorrectly
- we get to hear in great detail how a male is becoming aroused
- the phrase “looks so damn much like Kat” is used
- you think you’re going to puke from all the cheese
- incest or a weird sexual relationship of some kind pops up

Save yourself the time and skip this one. Yuck.
Profile Image for Heather.
211 reviews18 followers
December 15, 2017
Awful, just awful. Couldn’t keep going. Far too much sappy emotional romantic angst between family members. Gross. I didn’t realize this was a romance novel, are they all like this? Ugh, awful. Barely a thought crosses anyone’s mind that doesn’t involve sexual desire and lust and greed, so the characters are god-awful boring. I can’t fathom how anyone gave this novel 3+*s. Awful.
Profile Image for Tanya.
415 reviews8 followers
October 3, 2009
WOW...What a great book! I was a little grossed out by the relationship of the main character and her interest, but since it happened more towards the end of the book, there was no way I was going ti stop reading it! =)
Profile Image for Lillian.
797 reviews
February 17, 2011
just okay story. I am annoyed by all the typos, though - don't authors have editors and proof readers anymore?
869 reviews3 followers
October 22, 2017
This story about the Dever family was great, it kept me thinking on who did it. I figured out one person but didn't get the other person and the end was a complete surprise to me.
Profile Image for Karin Hodges.
21 reviews
December 5, 2017
Another great one by Lisa Jackson

Loved the characters and plot. Had guessed the killer but had no idea how the plot was going to twist. A great read.
1 review
April 3, 2018
I loved this story. It was full of suspense and emotion and truly kept me guessing until the end.
489 reviews2 followers
February 22, 2020
London Danvers disappeared when she was just a child, along with her nanny. Now, some twenty years later she returns. Of course the Danvers are the wealthiest family in Portland so they doubt who she really is. As she tries to prove her heritage someone is out to wither scare her off or kill her.
The novel has a lot of twists and turns, but I could have done without the romanticism of two of the characters.
Profile Image for Linda Munro.
1,934 reviews26 followers
October 11, 2019
Twenty years ago, the precocious, four-year-old, youngest daughter of lumber and hotel tycoon Witt Danvers disappeared without a trace. She was the only child Danvers shared with his second wife, known as Kat. Over time, several young women had shown up in Portland, all claiming to be the missing heiress; than Adria Nash came to town. Not only was she claiming to be the missing London Danvers; she was also the spitting image of Kat.

At the time of London’s abduction, her Nanny also disappeared without a trace; shortly thereafter, Kat fell to her death under suspicious circumstances which were eventually ruled unintentional suicide caused by the desperation and grief of loosing her daughter.

Returning with only images of her time in Portland and no real memories concerning the Danvers clan; Adria arrives armed with a video tape created by her adoptive father and hidden away to be found after his death. It is not proof positive; but incentive enough to call in the family’s private investigator.

But, the closer Adria gets to the truth, the closer a killer is getting to her. Can her bad boy half-brother save her or will he fall along the way?
157 reviews2 followers
November 13, 2019
Repetitive and a little long but kept my interest in who done it
169 reviews
August 19, 2024
Book was okay. I think 200 pages shorter would have been better. Story seemed to drag on but liked the ending.
Profile Image for Melissa.
Author 3 books8 followers
Read
July 28, 2023
This might be the worst book I’ve ever read. And yet, I finished it. I deserve a reward. I guess the reward was to not have to read anymore of this drivel. If constant repetition, incest, and abusive men made to seem sexy are your thing, then go for it. Otherwise, trust me. Just no.
Profile Image for Joyce Villeta.
Author 7 books18 followers
November 9, 2018
Romantic and very suspenseful. Kept me going. I enjoyed it thoroughly!
Displaying 1 - 30 of 336 reviews

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