Tessa Leoni

About the Tessa Leoni series

Tessa Leoni is a Massachusetts State Police trooper first introduced as a murder suspect in Lisa Gardner's D.D. Warren novel Love You More (2011), when her own daughter goes missing the same night her abusive husband is shot dead in their kitchen. Gardner spun Tessa off into her own two-book run afterward, following her post-scandal career as a private investigator specializing in finding what other people would rather keep hidden. In Touch & Go, she's hired to find a missing teenage runaway and uncovers a family with far more to lose than a single secret, while Crash & Burn follows a New Hampshire woman with amnesia after a car crash who insists her husband and daughter are dead — despite records showing neither ever existed.

Both books lean into Gardner's interest in unreliable narration and the gap between what a case looks like on the surface and what's actually happened, carried over from Tessa's introduction in Love You More. Wyatt Foster, a New Hampshire sheriff's detective, becomes a recurring presence and eventual romantic interest across both books, giving the pair a throughline even though each case is self-contained. Readers who enjoyed Tessa as a supporting mystery in Love You More get her as a full lead here, with her own trust issues and instinct for spotting a story that doesn't add up driving the investigation instead of D.D. Warren's more procedural approach.