Tess Gerritsen’s The Killing Place

Tess Gerritsen is one of ‘my authors’ – that is, one of the authors whose books I buy (or borrow from the library) as soon as they come out. I’ve actually started on her more recent one The Silent Girl, which I spotted on the FastBack* shelf at the library yesterday.

The Killing Place is still part of the Maura Isles and Jane Rizzoli series, but it’s quite different in atmosphere and structure to most of the others which probably fall into the (grizzly, gruesome, gripping) police procedural or medical examiner area (though, I should stress, far from ordinary or formulaic, if you haven’t read any of them). 

Isles, departing from her normal logical and meticulous self, goes off on a spontaneous grip with an old friend and his family and friends and they end up snowbound in an eerily deserted village. The atmosphere is very reminiscent of ghost stories and haunted houses and the tension and suspense that Gerritsen is so good at is given another setting which brings it out even further.

The Killing Place brings up themes and issues of cultish religion, police corruption, friendship and survival and, of course, fear. It has the usual twists and turns, with Gerritsen being one of the few modern crime/thriller writers who really does keep me guessing right to the very end.

The Killing Place works particularly well as a stand-alone thriller, as well, I think. It gives regular readers enough of the emotional and character development, with glimpses of Rizzoli, Brophy and Sansone, but not so much as to confuse or put off new readers.

I’m already well into The Silent Girl, so hopefully I can review that next week for Sunday Reading here at WAHM-BAM!

Tess Gerritsen writes a regular blog and also regularly contributes to Murderati.com.

Rizzoli and Isles, a TV series based on Gerritsen’s novels, starts on Tuesday on Alibi at 10pm on Tuesday 13 September. I’ll be watching to see how her work has been translated to the small screen.

* FastBacks are new releases you get to borrow for a week and can’t renew. An excellent way of making sure plenty of people get to read the new books (though, of course, not much good if it takes you a month to read a book).

This is a Sunday Reading post.