Thursday, December 14

Vanish - Tess Gerritsen

As Vanish begins, Jane, a Boston detective, is a week overdue for the delivery of her first child with husband Gabriel, an FBI agent. The novel revolves around the mystery of a hostage situation; Jane is one of the hostages, and Gabriel is involved with the negotiations. So far so predictable.
However, Gerritsen has combined the present tense, third-person view with the first-person story of Mila, an illegal immigrant from Belarus brought to the US as a sex-slave. There are vanishing hospital staff nobody knows, a crusading journalist, a paranoid Gulf War vet with a conspiracy theory ideation, the threat that Jane's identity as a cop will be discovered by the hostages, and a massacre that may have been covered up.
Although I've read a couple of Gerritsen's earlier works, this is the first of the Jane Rizzoli series to cross my path. I bought Vanish because the blurb opens with a pathologist who discovers one of her corpses breathing, and I have an interest in death work and death studies. Oh, and Borders had it on their 2 for 3 table :)
The medical aspects of the novel are realistic and accurate, which is always a joy. The weaving of a first-person narrative through a third-person work is interesting and well-constructed. I think it helps that the third-person sections are all present tense, while Mila reflects on how she got to her current position.
The plot is well-paced, the characters are three dimensional, the ending requires the smallest of willing suspensions of disbelief, and the fact that I was unfamiliar with their past (book one - three in the series) did not affect my enjoyment. I'll be heading back to my usual (independent) bookshop to try the rest of the series. - Alex

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