Author:  Lisa Scottoline
Title:  Think Twice
Publisher:  St. Martin's Press

The opening line on the dust jacket flap of Lisa Scottoline's thriller Think Twice asks an interesting question on the nature of evil: Is it born in us or is it bred? Stories can be a great way to illustrate aspects of human nature, and Scottoline had created two characters in her previous books that would give her the opportunity to investigate this line of thought.

Benedetta "Bennie" Rosato and her twin sister Alice Connolly are the blonde-haired, blue-eyed test subjects in this experiment. Though identical in DNA the girls had been separated at birth and lived very different lives. They grew up without knowing of the other's existence. Scottoline introduces the characters to each other in her book Mistaken Identity when Alice hires Bennie to be her lawyer after being accused of murdering a police officer.  Though Alice is proven to be innocent, Bennie sees a side of her newly-found sister that appears criminal at best.

Scottoline picks the sisters' story back up in Dead Ringer where Alice is going around Philadelphia posing as her twin, creating havoc for the maverick lawyer. The book ends with reconciliation between the women with Bennie helping Alice get a respectable job in a nonprofit agency.

Think Twice opens two years later with Alice having left the job, having embezzled money from the agency and now preparing to make a play on three million dollars of Bennie's savings. She concocts a devious plan of impersonating her sister again in order to gain access to her accounts and transfer them out of the country. Alice's acting will have to convince those closest to Bennie, including her ex-boyfriend, the associates in her law firm, and her faithful dog, Bear. This also means that Alice will have to get rid of Bennie permanently.

The story, though creative, isn't very believable. Alice has all the breaks in the deception, while Bennie—after miraculously getting free from a box, buried underground in a farmer's hay field, with the help of a hungry wolf—can't get anyone to believe she is who she says she is. Everyone that could corroborate her story is either unavailable or is already convinced she is evil Alice. Yes, unbelievable, but at the same time some guilty-pleasure reading.

Scottoline alternately weaves the story line between three characters' points of view—Bennie, Alice, and Mary (an associate in Bennie's law firm). Each chapter is short, just one to three pages, and does more to move the storyline forward than it does to delve into the "nature of evil" question.  The characters do have to address the evil that resides in them, or around them, but ultimately the story is whether or not Bennie will stoop to Alice's behaviors in order to stop her evil doppelganger.

This book, with the short, action-based chapters, reads more like a screenplay than it does a novel. With a good edit, taking out some of the annoying side characters (like Mary's father with a worn out battery in his hearing-aid that makes him SHOUT ALL HIS DIALOG), this could be pitched as a movie. If you aren't already a Lisa Scottoline fan you may want to wait for the screen version to come out. I'm suggesting it could be a great Mary-Kate and Ashley comeback vehicle for their series of twin movies (with Ashley being the evil twin, of course).

Readers should note that the book mentions some elements of sex, violence, drug use, and cruelty to animals and lawyers.

**This review first published on March 30, 2010.