The Backstory to Think Twice: A Special Bonus

By Lisa Scottoline

The Backstory to Think Twice, a special bonus story.

Is Evil born or bred? Bennie looks exactly like her identical twin, Alice, but the darkness in Alice's soul makes them two very different women. But there are two sides to every story!

Read this story, and then read bestselling author Lisa Scottoline's explosive novel, Think Twice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Dec 17, 2010
• ISBN: 9781429990837

Lisa Scottoline

Lisa Scottoline is the New York Times bestselling author of over thirty novels including Look Again, Lady Killer, Think Twice, Save Me and Everywhere That Mary Went. She also writes a weekly column, “Chick Wit,” with her daughter Francesca Serritella, for The Philadelphia Inquirer. The columns have been collected in several volumes, including Why My Third Husband Will Be a Dog and My Nest Isn’t Empty, It Just Has More Closet Space. Scottoline has won an Edgar® Award and Cosmopolitan magazine’s “Fun Fearless Fiction” Award, and she served as the president of Mystery Writers of America. She teaches a course on justice and fiction at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, her alma mater. She lives in the Philadelphia area.

Book preview

St. Martin’s Press

THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION. ALL OF THE CHARACTERS, ORGANIZATIONS, AND EVENTS PORTRAYED IN THIS STORY ARE EITHER PRODUCTS OF THE AUTHOR’S IMAGINATION OR ARE USED FICTITIOUSLY.

The Backstory to Think Twice 

Copyright © 2010 by Lisa Scottoline.

All rights reserved.

For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

St. Martin’s books are published by

St.Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Contents

Begin Reading

Preview

About the Author

From Bennie’s Point of View:

Bennie Rosato shuddered when she caught sight of the prison. The building was three stories tall and stretched the length of several city blocks. Its solid red-brick façade was unbroken except for a row of bulletproof windows, slit sideways like razor cuts. The small sign out in front didn’t disclose that the prison was a maximum security institution, but the spiky steel guard towers and spiraling barbed wire suggested strongly that killers, rapists, and arsonists lived inside.

At least when they weren’t on parole.

Bennie pulled into a parking space, got out of her Ford, and strode down the sidewalk to the prison, trying with little luck to suppress her anxiety. She’d figured she’d never see the prison again when she stopped practicing criminal law, until the telephone call she got today from an inmate. The inmate, a woman, had been charged with the shooting murder of her boyfriend, a Philadelphia homicide detective, almost a year ago. The defendant was awaiting trial, and the evidence against her was strong; she’d been seen fleeing the scene of the crime, and her clothes, stained with the detective’s blood, had been found in a nearby dumpster. But the woman had claimed a group of uniforms had framed her, and a police conspiracy always got Bennie’s attention. She’d packed her briefcase and driven up.

The prison was on the northern outskirts of Philadelphia, constructed on an island of concrete that was cut off from the civilized world by the Delaware River and Interstate 95. The institution shared the island with two other city prisons, in a bit of urban planning inspired by Australia, and felt twice as hot. The cement pavement baked in the sun,

Reviews for The Backstory to Think Twice

[catellington · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This fast-paced gratuity begans to unroll with the reader?s introduction to Benedetta ?Bennie? Rosato, the capturing thriller?s star protagonist and a famous attorney in the branch of criminal law.Bennie, a statuesque blonde with heavy bones and average looks, is contacted?for the purpose of legal services?by Alice Connolly, a convicted murderer who has been sentenced to state prison for killing her boyfriend, a former detective with the Philly PD.Alice, while continuing to proclaim her innocence, vehemently alleges that her boyfriend?the slain detective?was actually exterminated by members of his own department in a conspiratorial cover-up.Fascinated by the peculiar case, Bennie agrees to accept Alice Connolly as a potential new client and travels to the maximum security prison to conduct her initial consultation with the ?framed? inmate. After going through the motions of providing her photo identification and completing the visitors application, Bennie is then led?by a prison guard?through the facility?s mind-boggling maze of electronic door control systems to the visiting room area on Alice Connolly?s cellblock where the inmate is seated and eagerly anticipating their very first meeting. But what Bennie is soon to discover awaiting her on the other side of those visiting room walls is not just any ordinary female inmate, but rather, a female inmate who just so happens to be Bennie?s bone-chilling spitting image.The plot here is immediately engaging and I am inclined to complete the entirety of this fiction in due time. As the twenty-eight page excerpt already has me excited, I?m looking forward to not only concluding my reading of the narrative, but also providing the same with a more extensive, all-inclusive analysis.Thank you, St. Martin?s Griffin.