The kids will be OK

By Ande Jacobson

Last to Die, is the tenth book in Tess Gerritsen’s Rizzoli & Isles series and was first released in 2012. Like the previous book, the Kindle version of this one includes a bonus short story in the Rizzoli & Isles canon entitled John Doe also from 2012. For the main story, Gerritsen weaves a complicated web of unlikely connections that build to a surprising conclusion. The focus is on three unfortunate children, Teddy Clock, Claire Ward, and Will Yablonski. The first part of the book gives some background on all three, and they have a strange connection in that they not only lost their families in tragic accidents, they lost the families that took them in afterwards in equally horrific fashion. The three seemingly had no connection to one another other than being their family’s last survivors. Through a series of unlikely events, they all end up at the Evensong School in an effort to keep them safe while the authorities investigate what happened to their families. Before meeting at the school, the three didn’t think they had ever met and didn’t think they had anything in common, at least at first. Julian Perkins also plays a major role in this story, and he and Dr. Maura Isles help one another with the investigation. Anthony Sansone also joins the fray in an important but peripheral capacity. Of course the police regulars including Jane Rizzoli, Barry Frost, Darren Crowe, Lieutenant Marquette, and others are prominent in the story as well.

There are some similarities to a book outside of the Rizzoli & Isles series. Gerritsen borrows a few of the elements that arise for her later Martini Club series. There are no direct character crossovers, but there are some organizational and textural connections.

The story digs deeply into what would be a traumatizing situation for anyone, but especially for a young child, or in this case three. It also becomes clear that while the three children at the center of this book share a more specific connection than most, the students at Evensong have all suffered horrific familial traumas. It drives home the need for their protection and their training to deal with the world at large once they grow up. While childhood trauma in varying degrees is a fact of life, this story brings together multiple incidents that are the stuff of nightmares, although Gerritsen doesn’t dwell on the gore. She explores the psychological challenges the children face and the difficulties their treatment presents, especially when combined with a clear threat to their physical safety, although the source of that threat is rather convoluted.

As is often the case in Gerritsen’s stories, not all is quite what it seems, and friends and foes can shift. As the story unfolds, the children are shown to be extremely resilient as they uncover crucial pieces of information from their own personal histories that help the investigation. While some of the extremes in the story are more than slightly implausible, the plot is compelling and quite the page-turner. As the investigators and the children put the pieces together, they develop a much greater appreciation for each other’s skills in untangling the mystery at hand. They collectively discover a common foe, and the story quickly moves into a complex conspiracy. The resolution is satisfying, albeit a tad unsettling.

While there is some crucial evidence uncovered through physical examination along the way, Gerritsen spends much more time on the psychological manipulation at play in this book making it much more of a psychological thriller than most of the series.

Gerritsen uses her educational and professional background to explore the aberrant behavior seen in her stories having studied Anthropology as an undergraduate at Stanford University and medicine at UC San Francisco. She worked in general practice in Hawaii before retiring from medicine to become a full-time writer. Over 35 years later, her husband is still a GP in their small town in Maine, and sometimes an odd conversation or town character sparks an idea for one of her books. That’s not to say that Evensong School is real, or that any of the characters bear any resemblance to anyone in Gerritsen’s life outside of Dr. Maura Isles. The good doctor shares some important history with the author, at least educationally if not personally. In crafting her stories, Gerritsen’s active imagination allows her to take even a mundane situation and make it into something much more interesting and potentially terrifying.

Gerritsen’s handling of the specific physical medical aspects of the story is slightly less clinical than in some of the previous books. There are still autopsy scenes with key information being discovered of course. That’s hard to avoid when one of the primary characters is a medical examiner, even though she’s not the one performing the autopsy. Instead, Gerritsen takes Maura beyond her usual domain and uses her medical expertise in a wider context. She reminds readers that medical examiners and pathologists are trained doctors even if their patients are usually not living. That doesn’t mean that they can’t use their training to examine the living effectively, and in fact some postmortem examinations require reconstructing actions taken while the patient was living to understand what happened. Readers have seen Maura step out of her comfort zone into treating a living patient in some of the previous stories as well, albeit with startling results. She doesn’t quite do that this time, but she does lend her expertise to some nonstandard situations to help further the investigation.

Upon resolution, it’s clear that the children are damaged, but they are also healing. How many will reappear in future stories is unclear at the conclusion of the book, although it’s likely that Julian Perkins will be back because of his tight relationship with Maura. Given the discovery of his connections at the school, some of his classmates may return as well.

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, by Tess Gerritsen
Last to Die, by Tess Gerritsen
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https://www.starttv.com/lists/the-differences-between-the-rizzoli-isles-books-and-tv-show