Hello everyone!
I'm normally not into this whole thriller novel kind of thing, mostly because of my fearsome, vivid imagination that gives me nightmares more often than not (and another reason why I don't watch horror movies, like, ever). But during my stay at the seaside this summer, my father brought along a couple of his books, and he's basically ALL over thrillers. The more on shock value they have, the better. Name any kind of thriller author and a book of his or hers will probably be found somewhere in our home library (no other way to call the mass of books we have in this house, I mean, come on). One of the books caught my attention because my aunt also read it, and she tends to not like those kind of reads herself: it was titled Body Double, by author Tess Gerritsen. I couldn't help myself; reading the back of the book and what it offered, I just had to dig in myself ... and couldn't stop reading or put the book down until the very last page. After getting home, I discovered it was the fourth book in a series, and decided I might as well start at the beginning.
I finished the tenth book, Last to Tie, a little while ago.
(image not mine)
The book brings back the two heroines of the series, Jane Rizzoli and Maura Isles. Jane is a homicide detective and Maura is the medical examiner, and they'd been partnered before in all the previous books. They had become friends, but Maura's recent testimony that put a bad cop in prison has placed her at odds with the force, and there's now a bit of a gulf between her and Jane, but it gets sidelined as we plunge head-first into the novel.
We track three gruesome murders where foster kids, who had barely escaped with their lives the first time around when their parents were killed, are pushed to the front again. by some chance, they all end up at the same boarding school, Eversong, where everyone else is just the same as they are, victims of a crime that had happened to them. But Teddy, Will and Claire are different - because the killer isn't going to stop until they're dead ...
The lead officer on Teddy's case doesn't listen to Jane at first - since he's the macho guy and all that jazz - but she drills it home to the sergeant that there are leads for her to chase down, and so that's just what she does. In the meantime, Maura has gone to stay at Eversong because a young man, Julian, who she's bonded with in one of the previous novels during a life-and-death experience, is also staying there. We get a glimpse into her complicated love life as well, but what's nice is that it doesn't take center-stage.
Three creepy dolls hung in a tree do.
That's just one thing that gets the ball rolling, and we meet up with a group of CIA agents who reveal themselves to Jane to work together to protect the kids. We also learn what happened:
back in the day, the Agency had an op that went wrong. A criminal's family was killed, and he alone survived to be put into a prison. Now he's escaped, and the three kids at Eversong are the only survivors from the original massacres, since their parents were the agents who brought the guy in.
Here's the kick though: turns out it wasn't the criminal, but the CIA agent gone rogue, and one of the father's (Teddy's dad) survived the initial massacre, went underground, and then resurfaced to draw her out and kill her. She does end up dead - with Jane's bullets inside her - but Teddy's father also gets shot in the neck and falls into a coma. Miraculously, however, he recovers and disappears with his son, while Will and Claire are left with a new sense of purpose at Eversong.
There's also a side-plot with the school's counsellor and we revisit the Mephisto Club from an earlier novel, but aside from that, it's a gripping thriller and I wasn't sure just who the bad guy was for real until the very last pages. I kept alternating between one of the criminal's kids surviving or something! I didn't think it would be a rogue agent though. In any event, I've been hooked on Jane and Maura's stories for a while now and I enjoy their portrayals, and how their private lives get shadowed into the main plots. I highly recommend the books to anyone who wants a little thrill.
Have you read any Rizzoli & Isles novels?
xx
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