The Keepsake: A Novel by Tess Gerritsen
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Book Reviews of The Keepsake: A Novel
Book Review: Murder, Mystery, Mayhem, and a Museum
Summary: 5 Stars
Watch out Patricia Cornwell! Tess Gerritsen is at the top of her game with The Keepsake - the best novel I've read in a long time! I was really impressed with Gerritsen's The Bone Garden: A Novel published last year and thought it was her finest work to date, but The Keepsake may be even better! I am a slow reader, and was able to read the 349 pages of The Keepsake in less than a week. Chapters 17,18, and 19 seemed a little slow to me but the rest of the book is full of surprises!
One thing that helps make this book so great is having Jane Rizzoli and Maura Isles working together again. The Crispin Museum serves as a great setting for a novel featuring Mummification, Murder, Mystery, and Mayhem. As an added bonus to a fascinating story, readers learn how the process of mummification works, how to create a "bog body" and are given detailed instruction on how to make a shrinking head (please don't practice these methods on your neighbors!). Also in The Keepsake, we learn the dire consequences of having a disorganized museum of freaky items that you can't account for.
Believable, intriguing, fast-paced, page-turning, easy to read - it's everything I love in a novel!
Book Review: excellent police procedural
Summary: 5 Stars
Boston-based medical examiner Maura Isles has examined a lot of corpses while on the job, but this one is special. The Crispin Museum invited the ME to attend a CAT scan of Madame X; the perfectly preserved mummy found in their basement who the curator believes will save their financially troubled facility.
However, instead of an ancient Egyptian royal, the modern medical test proves the mummy is a recent homicide victim. They also find a cryptic note inside. Boston Police Department Detectives Jane Rizzoli and Barry Frost lead the investigation. The message leads the cops to archeologist Josephine Pulcillo, who along with her mom has been on the run from an obsessed serial killer. Soon more modern day mummies are found, but the culprit remains elusively hidden in spite of Egyptian embalming knowledge.
The latest Rizzoli-Isles police procedural is a superb thriller that needs a graphic warning label not to read on a full stomach. The story line is fast-paced from the moment the mummy goes from ancient historical to contemporary and never slows down as obsession keeps a mother and daughter in fear of revealing secrets to the cops. Tess Gerritsen is at her best with this gruesome horrific murder mystery.
Harriet Klausner
Book Review: Better than Reich
Summary: 5 Stars
Read 2 books last weekend -- this one & Kathy Reichs new one - Devil Bones or something like that. Short review. Gerritsen's book is fast-paced and concise -- it gets you to where you want to go. The only complaint -- don't really know why Maura Isles was the focus of a few chapters. Other than doing the necropsy at the beginning, her character offered little to moving the plot along and nothing to the resolution, so bringing in her relationship with the priest and the mysterious millionaire for a couple of chapters seemed like a waste. Maybe a prep for the next book? Compared to Reichs, who seems to want to fill pages and pages of minute detail about nothing we care about and few can understand, Gerritsen's book is the one that will keep you glued until the end. Reichs lost me after spending 2 pages describing the history of her neighborhood in a drive from a crime scene back to her house. It's like she wants to show how much she knows about everything no matter how absolutely STONE COLD DULL it is. Gerritsen - you don't learn a lot that doesn't pertain to the plot.
Book Review: Her BEST so far!!!
Summary: 5 Stars
This book is her best so far, at least from my perspective. I just loved it! The story grabs you and keeps you enthralled from the very first and the ending is very satisfying and closes up all loose ends. There were several places where I cringed in my seat, had to cover the next page so as not to reveal a new clue too soon, all very melodramatic for me, but it shows just how good the book was, just how involved I got with the story. It was SO NOT predictable, with lots of twists and turns, but easy to follow and satisfying with each new 'reveal.' Not as much on Rizzoli's personal life as the last few, I'd have enjoyed more on that, but that's not really a flaw, just personal preference. Other favorites of Tess Gerritsen include The Sinner, Body Double and Vanish.Book Review: Takes stalking to new heights
Summary: 5 Stars
Jane Rizzoli is one of the strongest female detective characters in the genre, and, after having her baby girl, she's back in action. Jane shines in this serial killer/stalker/confused identity thriller, as she struggles to unkink the many tangled lines in these crimes. Gerritsen appears to be attempting to show Jane as a whole person - mother, partner, cop, friend - and it's refreshing to see her uncertain at times, empathizing with other parents at others, trying to be supportive of her soon to be divorced detective partner. And the crimes in this installment are ingenious. While it's possible to make good guesses as to what "went down", there are some gratifying zigs and zags along the way, and at the conclusion, to keep the reader absorbed. 5 stars.