Tess Gerritsen - Listen To Me

 

Rating: 4/5

 

Review:

An enjoyable police procedural 

 

This is the first Tess Gerritsen I’ve read and I enjoyed it. Even though it’s the thirteenth in this series I found it worked fine without having read any of the earlier ones because Gerritsen is very skilful at telling us any history we need without a lot of cumbersome explanation.

It’s a very decent police procedural; Jane Rizzoli is called to a nasty murder of a popular nurse and her investigations suggest links to another murder nearly two decades earlier. A sense of menace is well developed and the eventual climax is a good deal more plausible than in many such books. In addition there’s a semi-comic side-plot involving Rizzoli’s redoubtable mother and dodgy goings-on in her neighbourhood which works surprisingly well and both recaps and develops Jane’s personal story.

The prose is unfussy and easy to read, Gerritsen paces and structures her plot very skilfully and the characters are well drawn, with the two leads especially being believable and engaging. In many ways this is a pretty standard police thriller, but is lifted above the general mass of such books by some very good writing and storytelling. It hasn’t left me desperate to search out more Rizzoli and Isles but I will certainly read another if it comes my way.