Friday, April 6, 2012

Body Double, by Tess Gerritsen ****

Pregnant women play key roles in this bone-chilling fourth novel in Gerritsen's edgy, suspenseful series of thrillers featuring Boston Medical Examiner Maura Isles and Homicide Detective Jane Rizzoli. Both of the usually gritty crime fighters are uncharacteristically vulnerable. Rizzoli is carrying her first child, and Isles—divorced and alone at age 40 and suddenly, unsettlingly aware of her biological clock—is experiencing decidedly unspiritual feelings for her priest. As the novel begins, Isles—an adopted child who never knew the identity of her birth parents—is confronted by the corpse of a murdered woman who is apparently her identical twin. Another detective, Rick Ballard, comes forward to say that he knew the victim and is certain her killer is a powerful pharmaceutical baron known to have stalked her. Isles falls for the handsome Ballard, but she isn't convinced by his theory, and she launches an investigation into her sister's past, following the trail to a state correctional facility and a schizophrenic inmate who may be her mother. This opens the cobwebbed pages of a nightmarish family album and leads Isles to a remote cabin in Maine where the long-dead body of a pregnant woman is discovered buried in the woods. The killer, Isles discovers, has been murdering pregnant women for decades, making periodic sweeps of the country. Meanwhile, brief scenes chronicle the diabolical kidnapping of an affluent pregnant housewife who is kept buried in a crude coffin. An electric series of startling twists, the revelation of ghoulishly practical motives and a nail-biting finale make this Gerritsen's best to date. 

I'm reading this series out of order, but that doesn't seem to hurt the main story lines.  

Like the others that I've ready by Tess Gerritsen, this was another straight forward mysteries.  They aren't incredibly deep, and I suspect that anybody who tried very hard could probably solve the mystery without too much trouble before it's spelled out for them.  They work for me, though.  I like to read for an hour or two each evening as a means to relax and let all the thoughts from the day go.  This series as fit the bill for that almost perfectly.

I will say that this one was maybe my least favourite of the series so far, in that so much has been happening to Maura and/or Jane (the two main characters in the series) that I'm already having to suspend some serious disbelief while reading them.  However, I do enjoy them.  I whipped through this one in a couple of evenings.

The Sinner, by Tess Gerritsen ****

I feel like I've started and stopped reading a number of books lately, and if I don't get past the first chapter, I haven't been writing about them here.  (It might be my mood that's the problem, not the books.)  Regardless, I was happy when I found a bunch of Tess Gerritsen books for $5 a pop.  I  knew they'd hold my attention, so I snapped them all up.    I just realized that I'm almost finished the third in the pile and haven't written anything about them here, so here goes:

Tess Gerritsen's The Sinner:

A grisly murder at a convent baffles Medical Examiner Maura Isles and Det. Jane Rizzoli at the start of this assured, richly shaded seventh novel from bestseller Gerritsen (The Apprentice; The Surgeon, etc.). The popular duo are called to Boston's Graystones Abbey when two nuns are discovered in an abandoned chapel, one dead and the other near death, both brutally bludgeoned. Red herrings are everywhere: Isles's discovery that one of the murdered nuns had recently given birth (followed shortly by the discovery of the baby's body in a pond near the convent); the murder of a homeless derelict with her face and extremities removed by her killer; and the lurking menace of a multinational chemical company. Complicating matters further is the sudden arrival of Isles's ex-husband, Victor, a celebrity humanitarian with his own suspicious connection to the case, and Rizzoli's old flame, FBI agent Gabriel Dean, who's responsible for the baby now growing in Rizzoli's belly. The investigation is rather low-key, but Gerritsen gives atmospheric depth to her tale with descriptions of snowbound Boston and an exotic past tragedy. Isles's pleasantly bitchy coldness ("Go ahead and pass me, idiots. I've met too many drivers like you on my slab") gives a welcome edge to the proceedings, and the struggles of both Isles and Rizzoli to balance their tough professional acts with romantic drama are satisfyingly gritty.

Good Book.  It was nothing heavy, but an entertaining, quick read.