When myth and reality merges

By Ande Jacobson

The Silent Girl, is the ninth book in Tess Gerritsen’s Rizzoli & Isles series, first released in 2011. This book is a treat in that the Kindle version also includes a bonus short story in the Rizzoli & Isles canon entitled Freaks from 2010. Gerritsen considers The Silent Girl a very personal story in which she ties in ancient Chinese folklore that her mother had related to her. Her mother learned these fables and legends during her childhood in China, and they add an ethereal element to the story that infuses the mythos into Jane Rizzoli’s world in unexpected ways. As often happens in Gerritsen’s books, she starts in the past giving readers a foundation they don’t realize connects until much later in the story. This time, although the story starts in San Francisco in the past, it quickly returns to Boston in the present where Maura Isles is testifying in court. Maura’s background matches that of the author to a point – both author and protagonist majored in Anthropology as undergraduates at Stanford and attended medical school at UC San Francisco. From there they diverge in specialty and position, but that’s merely background. The trial in the story sets the scene for why Maura is at odds with most of Boston PD for much of this story. Her factual testimony is key in convicting a police officer accused of killing a young man while in custody. Although the court case has nothing to do with the crimes being investigated in the bulk of the story, it makes the connection between Maura and Jane all the more poignant despite the growing rift caused by Maura’s crossing the thin blue line through her court testimony.

The case at hand appears in Boston’s Chinatown after the trial scene ends. A freelancer is giving a tour telling his audience about a grisly massacre that had occurred there nineteen years before at a restaurant known as the Red Phoenix. Although the building where the restaurant was located is now empty and for sale, the ghosts of the past remain, or so says the tour guide. The only two employees on duty at the time of the massacre, the waiter Jimmy Fang, and the cook, Wu Weimin, have backstories that slowly come to light throughout the investigation. During the tour guide’s spiel, he thinks he catches a glimpse of something overhead on the rooftop and is unnerved. Moments later, one of the kids on his tour finds what the group thinks is a prop, but it is not. It’s the tip of a new case of murder and intrigue. The object in question is a severed right hand, and near it a gun, though the tourists only see the hand. The police find the gun when they scour the crime scene. Where they find the rest of the body that the hand came from is a story in itself and adds to the intrigue.

New characters join the canon this round including Iris Fang, wife of the murdered Jimmy Fang who had lost their daughter Laura two years prior to the Red Phoenix massacre; Johnny Tam, a young, eager detective who desperately wants to join the Homicide team and gets assigned to them for this case; Patrick Dion, a rich, venture capitalist whose ex-wife, Dina, was also murdered at the massacre and whose daughter Charlotte went missing from a school field trip two years later and was never found; Mark Mallory, Charlotte’s step brother after her mother Dina left her father and married Mark’s father; Bella Li, one of the instructors at Iris Fang’s martial arts studio with a mysterious backstory; detectives Ingersoll and Buckholz who caught the original massacre case; and several others. As the story moves forward, obscure connections come to light.

It’s clear that some of the new characters introduced in this story may find their way into future books in some way. Gerritsen has a penchant for building on previous stories in interesting ways. Mysterious new characters can later become major players in some way, particularly if they have special skills when they are first introduced. One character who makes a reappearance in The Silent Girl is Julian “Rat” Perkins. He and Maura developed a strong connection in the previous book when he saved Maura’s life, and he returns in this one in a brief but key role being the catalyst for Maura to see something that was missed in the old case that she shares with Jane. From that, Jane is able to solve the case, or at least a large portion of it.

This story is interesting in how Gerritsen weaves the ancient world of her ancestors and the modern world together showing that the legends still have a place in modern society. As is usually the case in a Gerritsen mystery, not everyone is who they appear to be though their history isn’t always apparent. The author not only shows how myth and reality can create a complex mixture, she also delves into aspects of the limits of right and wrong exploring when so-called vigilante justice is either warranted or at least accepted and the ramifications that can have when it happens. This book gets much more philosophical than others in the series bringing out new sides to the core cast, particularly Jane Rizzoli. She questions her preconceptions in new ways seeing shades of grey where before she saw stark black and white.

Those shades of grey come into play during the investigation, and in the epilogue after the case is concluded. Not every aspect gets formally resolved, at least within the police files, but there too something that would have Jane previously would have found completely unacceptable finds a home. It will be interesting to see which newly introduced characters reappear later in the series.

References:

The Surgeon, by Tess Gerritsen
The Apprentice, by Tess Gerritsen
The Sinner, by Tess Gerritsen
Body Double, by Tess Gerritsen
Vanish, by Tess Gerritsen
The Mephisto Club, by Tess Gerritsen
The Keepsake, by Tess Gerritsen
Ice Cold, by Tess Gerritsen
The Silent Girl, Tess Gerritsen
https://www.tessgerritsen.com/
https://www.starttv.com/lists/the-differences-between-the-rizzoli-isles-books-and-tv-show