Ice Cold
Tess Gerritsen
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Buy *Ice Cold: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel* by Tess Gerritsen online

Ice Cold: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel
Tess Gerritsen
Ballantine
Paperback
464 pages
April 2011
rated 4 of 5 possible stars

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When a new Tess Gerritsen book comes out, it’s a no-brainer that I’m going to be picking it up. This was the case when I saw that Ice Cold, the new Rizzoli & Isles book, was on the shelf, prominently labelled with the “Now a series on TNT” crest (a series I’m also enjoying). Gerritsen continues to explore these fascinating characters as she gives us a new mystery to gnaw on. While this isn’t the greatest example of Gerritsen’s prowess, it is a decent novel that does a good job in changing some of the mythology of the series.

Boston’s Chief Medical Examiner, Dr. Maura Isles, has been stuck in a secret relationship with a priest, allowing only brief liaisons that only make her hunger for more in her life. So when she’s at a forensics conference in Colorado and happens upon an old classmate - a man who’s both attractive and single - she finds herself opening up - so much so that she agrees to join him, his daughter and their two friends on a jaunt to a mountain cabin in the wilds of the state. When heavy snow forces them off the road, they find an abandoned village nestled in a valley - a village seemingly abandoned so quickly that food was left on tables. When Isles disappears, Rizzoli, a Boston Homicide detective and Isles’s best friend, must track down what happened to her before the secret of that village ends up costing even more lives - perhaps even that of Dr. Maura Isles.

Gerritsen has slowly been developing Isles and her romantic entanglements over the last few books. Ice Cold, carries this to completion, or at least it appears to. While Isles is a wonderful character, she has been far too morose and willing to look at things in a physical manner (often the first thing she sees when a man comes around is the quality of his looks). This may be coming to an end as she realizes that this “relationship” with the priest has no good ending. He’s not going to leave the Church, despite the fact that he’s sinning against it every time they sneak in a quick one. She’s doomed to be lonely 95 percent of the time.

This all comes out during the interaction between Isles and the classmate who recognizes her at the conference, though not because she blabs about it. It’s meeting him and seeing what he has to offer that does it. She doesn’t do things on a whim; it’s not part of her nature. When she decides to go against that because it will mean a break from her old personality, she grows as a character, even if it doesn’t quite work out the way she wanted it to.

This is definitely Isles’s book. Rizzoli takes a back seat, despite being prominent during the middle part of the book when it’s unclear whether Isles is actually alive or not (despite the obvious, Gerritsen actually does a pretty good job with the head fake here). After a number of Rizzoli books, it’s good to see her in the role of a more supporting character.

Most of Gerritsen’s books express some kind of social consciousness; Ice Cold, isn’t any different. Here she examines extremist cults in which the leaders take child brides and run their flocks with an iron fist, removing them from civilization. We get to see just how tied up they can get with small-town politics (maybe that’s why so many of them are situated near these towns?).

Gerritsen’s fluid writing flies by. I haven’t been reading books very quickly recently, but this was one book I couldn’t put down thanks to a combination of Gerritsen’s characters and her prose. She sets the scene well. This was another cold-weather book read in the middle of summer, yet it still managed to elicit a shiver or two from me as she describes just how frigid Isles’s predicament is.

I greatly enjoyed the book, although it’s nowhere near Gerritsen’s best (that’s still Vanish). It’s hard to quantify why that is - it’s just the general feeling that the book gave me. It’s typical Gerritsen, and perhaps the feeling comes from the fact that it’s not more than that.

Don’t get me wrong. You should definitely pick up Ice Cold if you get the chance, especially if it’s the only Gerritsen book that you can find. But if you can find others, start with them first. This one will wait.



Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Dave Roy, 2010

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