Lisa Gardner

Lisa Gardner is a bestselling thriller writer raised in Hillsboro, Oregon, who studied international relations at the University of Pennsylvania and published her first novel, Walking After Midnight, at twenty, under the pseudonym Alicia Scott, the name behind thirteen romantic suspense novels before she rebranded under her own name and shifted toward darker, more procedural crime fiction. As Lisa Gardner, she is best known for D.D. Warren, a driven Boston homicide detective introduced in Alone (2005) who investigates cases built around child abduction, cult psychology and survivor trauma, often narrated partly from the victim's or suspect's own point of view for a genuinely unsettling effect. From Find Her (2016) onward, Warren shares the series with Flora Dane, a kidnapping survivor turned vigilante ally, giving the later books a co-lead dynamic rather than a single fixed protagonist. Gardner writes two further Boston-set series featuring Quincy, Rainie and Tessa Leoni, in which Warren also makes supporting appearances. New readers should start with Alone for D.D. Warren's introduction. Since 2021, Gardner has largely turned her attention to a new character, Frankie Elkin, an unemployed, recovering-alcoholic amateur investigator who searches for missing people everyone else has stopped looking for, a strong next step for readers who finish the Warren books wanting more.