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LAST TO DIE
by Tess Gerritsen
Ballantine, August 2012
352 pages
$27.00
ISBN: 0345515633


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Gerritsen's latest is a shape-shifter. The reader encounters a voice recalling a manhunt in Italy, rendered—appropriately—in an italic font, whose mission was to assassinate "a monster." Perhaps the speaker is a member of some shadowy US agency whose name may be rendered in an acronym.

Turn the page, and all at once, readers are in the mind of Claire Ward, a troubled teen in foster care, at the moment her foster family is murdered. The killer trains a gun on her, then evaporates. An "angel" wearing black walks her away from the carnage. Following pages place us alongside Will Yablonski as he witnesses his foster family home, along with his foster family, vaporize in an explosion. Same angel. Same black dress.

Turn the page, and we are in female space, watching a dismayed Detective Jane Rizzoli try on a pink bridesmaid's dress with too many frills. Her terribly ordinary familial chagrin is interrupted by the sudden arrival of a calling-card that should, by now, be familiar: a family is killed in a bloodbath. Their foster child, Teddy Clock, is the sole survivor. From under the bed where he hides and saves himself, he views black shoes pace the floor. Perhaps they belong to the monster. Perhaps the angel.

Turn the page. Italy. Hired assassins close in on the monster, his wife, and his small children. Turn the page, a boarding school. The Maine Woods. It is so serene that Thoreau's ghost could be presiding, benevolently, over the wonderful unfolding and growth of children's minds; next to him glide antlered deer, innocent of all evil, at one with lush nature. The boarding school, Evensong, specializes in child survivors of violent death. There, amidst the turning colors of the maples, protected by the stone walls of a fairy-tale castle, are Claire, Will, and Teddy, who, readers learn, have survived not one family massacre, but two. Among other scarred children, they learn to form childish cliques, imagine a boy or girl like them, suffer the barbs of schoolyard bullying.

In its Italian and italic pages, Gerritson's novel is a spy thriller. In interview rooms and on the mean streets, stateside, the novel morphs into detective fiction. Entering the gates of Evensong, in the Maine Woods, in a castle, longtime readers in the mystery genre know that they are entering the Agatha-Christie-esque fictional space of the cozy.

All cozies, whether admitted or not, leak. The monster, whose name is ultimately Greed, easily enters the woods and breaks into the castle. There are no angels, really. The last chapters of Gerritsen's novel feature Rizzoli and Isles' attempts to save the lives of the child victims and preserve some place or moment where innocence can exist. The subgenres of the mystery meet—sometimes, to this reader, there is rather too much on her mystery plate—however, the meditation about where and how we conceive of innocence, is a true one.

§ Cathy Downs, Professor of English at Texas A&M University-Kingsville, is a longtime devotee of the well-turned whodunit.

Reviewed by Cathy Downs, October 2012

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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