Gerritsen, Tess: Vanish

  Amazon  

Tess Gerritsen's latest medical thriller begins with a nightmare: a handful of Russian girls, flown from Minsk to Mexico City and herded north, find that the jobs they'd been told were waiting for them across the border--as waitresses and dressmakers--were a fiction. Instead, the girls are to be kept as sex slaves, locked away in a remote house in Ashburn, Virginia and forced to service the important, sadistic men who pay for them. The horrible experience of these women, the secret they come to be privy to, lies behind the rest of Gerritsen's story.

Hours north of these unfortunates' hellhole, forensic pathologist Dr. Maura Isles, passing a July evening among the refrigerated dead in the Boston morgue, has her own nightmare to contend with--a corpse stirring in a body bag.Hours north of these unfortunates' hellhole, forensic pathologist Dr. Maura Isles, passing a July evening among the refrigerated dead in the Boston morgue, has her own nightmare to contend with--a corpse stirring in a body bag. The drugged and nearly drowned woman Maura finds grasping at life recovers quickly in the local hospital, so thoroughly, in fact, that she is soon taking hostages at gun point. Among these is another of the book's protagonists, pregnant police detective Jane Rizzoli. Unraveling the desperate hostage taker's story is the work of the rest of the novel.

Vanish is the fifth installment in Gerritsen's Jane Rizzoli/Maura Isles series. Readers like myself who have not read its predecessors need not fear jumping into the series with this book: it was clear that the principal characters--Jane and Maura and Jane's husband, FBI agent Gabriel Dean--shared a history I was not privy to, but this did not detract from my enjoyment of the novel. Vanish is fast-paced and seamlessly written, its characters likeable enough, the suspense sometimes gripping. Gerritsen is clearly a writer who knows what she's doing. Come to think of it, you may want to start with the first book in the series, The Surgeon, and read on from there.