Favourite Author No. 2 – Tess Gerritsen

Tess Gerritsen is a usurper on my list. Until I met her at the last RWNZ conference, she wasn’t even on my top 10 list. But we got a free book of hers in our goodie bags and, of course, I read it. It was “The Killing Place”, a Rizzoli and Isles novel.

I was hooked, not just by Tess’s voice but by the Rizzoli and Isles partnership so I downloaded onto my Kindle and read every other book in the long series. That’s why you can only see the one book on my bookcase shelves. That is certainly a disadvantage of a kindle but there are too many other advantages to sway me. In fact, I stored and read five new books on it while in Europe recently for ten days. Reading is a great way to pass those interminable hours waiting around in airports.

Tess fills her books with a ton of research and her own considerable knowledge, which enriches what are already great and often gory stories. By the way, I have also read some of her stand-alone books and have loved them too but I miss Rizzoli and Isles while reading them.

There is a TV series based on them in the States and I googled to see who played the two central roles and was disappointed. Jane Rizzoli is depicted in the books as a tough-as-nails detective with a soft centre somewhere deep inside but she is not that pretty and her hair is usually wild and out of control. So who do they get to play her character? Beautiful, sleak Angie Harmon. And Sasha Alexander as Maura Isles? Really? Maura has very dark, straight, shiny, rigidly cut hair, not your all-American long wavy brown hair like Sasha’s. But she is beautiful – at least they got that part right. These two below look as if they have come out of the same pod, while in the books, Rizzoli and Isles are exact opposites in many ways, even though they do eventually form a firm bond.