"The Silent Girl" by Tess Gerritsen

I will start a bit backwards and tell you that I found  Gerritsen through TNT’s  Rizzoli & Isles series about a year ago.  The lead character Jane Rizzoli is played by Angie Harmon who is one of my all time TV favorites.  (She’s still my favorite lawyer on “Law & Order”).  Add the kick-ass music of Drop Kick Murphy’s and an edgy opening, I was hooked. I loved the series and read the credits surprised to find they were based on the book series by Tess Gerritsen.  I went to the library and the journey began into the lives of Rizzoli and Isles.   “The Silent Girl” is the 9^th in the series about these two very different best friends.  Jane is a seasoned cop with almost super hero qualities and Maura Isles is the quirky medical examiner with a brilliance that often seems freakishly scary.  I adore them both.   Already a fan of the detective type mystery, this is no pulp fiction.  The true friendship between Jane & Maura is a cool part of the series.  They go from being totally girlie best friends to ‘just the facts.” In this book you take a trip through Chinatown in Boston which threads Asian legend, history, and underground crime.  Jane again is a target as she investigates the brutal murder of a woman found on a rooftop.  What she doesn’t know is that this is a link to the past and a 19 year old murder that was never solved. This book finds Maura estranged to Jane and the police department after incidents in a previous book.  Clearly, Maura has broken the blue line code in the commission of her duties and she is now shunned.  What is challenging is how Jane also walks that new line in her friendship with Maura.  After loving the deep and abiding friendship as part of why I love the series, I want to have them make up. Hopefully, this will happen in the next book. Gerritsen writes a compelling and gritty series. The characters have depth and spunk. The other characters which include well defined family members enrich the series.  A huge difference from the book & TV is that Jane is married in the books but not on TV.  As a fan of the books and that part of her life and a well defined sexy husband, I miss that part protrayed on the TV version. Check our your local library or favorite bookseller to get these great books. I still have 3 books to read in the series and I will savor every one.  So my Mystery reading journey begins in Boston, the home of my birth and I hope you all who read our reviews will enjoy the journey with us.

Reflections A to Z

It’s been a journey reading mystery authors A to Z. Before Wendy and I start with a new set of mysteries, I wanted to say a few words to wrap up my part of the effort.  We began the A-Z author trip as a lark that wound up with about a year and a half of reading books that might never have come under our reading radar.  With a deliberate purpose of choosing an author purely by the letter of their name was usually easy, but the more difficult letters like X, the  website “Stop You’re Killing me” bailed these humble bloggers more than once. I have to admit I read a few crazy stories and what I called orphan titles that likely never had wide circulation in their day.  I went to libraries, book stores big and small, and second-hand bookstores galore. I was fortunate to get some cool feedback, including two of the authors responding to my posts on their books.  Other cool things that happened were contact from a videographer and also from a man that maintains a website about one of my authors.  At one point I was humbled when I dared to be a bit harsh and really critique a book.  I held back a bit at the risk of being pompous and being rude to the author.  The author contacted me directly and I really was glad I had modified my post.  It turns out that jumping into a series without really knowing a back story and then judging the series based on one book can be a problem.  Again it was part of the growing pains of being a blogger that writes about books.  I loved every minute of it and look soon for the next part of the journey of two friends who blog about mysteries with very different points of view.  To those of you who read our posts, thank you for playing along.