Customer Reviews

The Sinner

5 star:		(48)
4 star:		(36)
3 star:		(27)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

After reading the Surgeon and the Apprentice any author would be hard pressed to come up with something as good, but, Tess Gerritsen has almost done it with this book. It's a real page turner. I hope she keeps these characters for awhile.
I have to admit I read the book in a day and a half. The only reason I didn't give it a 5 is because I just finished reading the Surgeon and the Apprentice and just couldn't put it up to those two.
Great book am awaiting her next work.

Although I was loath to put this book down until the final page, it still was not as gripping as her last two books. Still if you like medical thrillers you can't go wrong with Ms. Gerritsen.

Without giving too much of the plot away the opening takes us to India and a massacred village. Then we are back in Boston at a brutal murder of a young novice and the injury of an older nun. The violence is unbelievable and there seems to be no indication of motive. But when the investigation moves forward ties between the murder of the young novice and the murder of an unidentified women in an abandon building are linked by bizzare circumstances. Detective Jane Rizzoli and Dr. Maura Isle work together to bring a killer to justice.

I enjoyed reading about Jane and I actually liked that Ms. Gerritsen was willing to portray this strong woman with normal human feelings of not thinking that she can do it all. I don't feel that romance was a huge part of the book. I'm a huge romance genre fan and the romance between Jane and Agent Gaberial Dean was way far back on the back burner and since I have been reading all the books involving Jane I was happy to see this relationship was continued and developed. As for the romance issue with Dr. Isle I feel that it played a part in the storyline and again this was not a priority in the plot. Yes, this book is not as griping as her last two...but then it is dealing with a different type of killer.

This book is worth picking up just keep and open mind and don't expect it to be like her others. Suspense is at a premium and favorite characters from previous book are included. If you have not read the last few books by Ms. Gerritsen don't worry, this book is still a stand alone story and by no means relys on previous titles. This is a fast paced read and a good way to spend a weekend.

Usually I can tell who the protagonist in a novel is right off the bat, lots of times just by reading the inside flap of a hard cover or the back of a paperback. But in this more than excellent thriller/mystery from Tess Gerritsen I had a hard time deciding if the novel belonged to Boston Medical Examiner Maura Isles or Police Detective Jane Rizzoli. In a well written suspense story told from the third person point of view, we get to wander around in the head of enough people to make the book interesting, usually four or five, but not so many that it becomes confusing, however we spend most of the time with our protag. In this book, however, Ms. Gerritsen seems to have divided our head time more or less equally between these two very well crafted characters and she's done it so well that it's frightening.

Dr. Maura Isles is called to a crime scene on a snowy day before Christmas, two nuns in a cloistered order have been attacked, one killed. Detective Jane Rizzoli is already at the scene. Maura discovers the dead nun was pregnant during the autopsy, Rizzoli faints, something this hard as nails cop has never done, but she can't help it, she's pregnant too and she doesn't know if she's going to keep the child as the father is FBI agent Gabriel Dean, who she had a brief affair with and is now back in Washington, a long way from Boston.

During the course of the investigation, Maura and Rizzoli discover that the surviving nun had spent two years in a leper colony in India, then later a body turns up with leprosy, however the face, hands and feet had been removed to hide the disease. Rizzoli and Maura wonder if there could be a connection and the FBI does too. Enter agent Dean to represent the Feds and further complicate Rizzoli's life. Should she tell him about the baby or not? Are the bodies related or not? And is the death of an executive from a major chemical company that just happened to have a plant upwind from that leper colony in India related? How many more are going to die? Maura gets close. The killer has his eyes on her. Can Rizzoli stop him?

There is a lot to take in in this fast moving story that will have you anticipating as much as it will have you guessing. After reading The Apprentice I couldn't imagine how Ms. Gerritsen could get any better, but she has, each one of her books is better than the last and that is really saying something.

Medical Examiner Maura Isles is called to a cloistered convent where one novitiate lies bludgeoned to death by a hammer and an older nun lies near death. The autopsy of the young nun reveals a shocking surprise, she had recently given birth. Dr. Isles and Detective Jane Rizzoli investigate for the answers to the many questions this case raises. Why would two nuns with no contact with the outside world be attacked? Before too long a gruesome third killing is tied to the nuns attack and the FBI become involved. In addition to the investigation, Isles and Rizzoli must confront unresolved issues from their pasts that interweave with a crime that goes far beyond the murder of nuns and an unidentified woman.

Jane Rizzoli has appeared in THE SURGEON and THE APPRENTICE. It is not necessary to read the former stories to enjoy THE SINNER, but it helps with character development. Also, both earlier books are excellent. This is not a book for the faint-hearted. The crime scenes and autopsies are very graphic. The book is well plotted with some really good twists, and it really keeps you reading. I liked the characters, but both women seem to be a little more intelligent in their careers than in their private lives. The ending was a bit to pat and was a little bit of a letdown after the promise of the strong beginning and middle of the book. Overall, it was not quite as good as the previous Rizzoli books, but still far superior to most medical/forensic thrillers.

I have been highly impressed by Tess Gerritsen's style of writing in her previous novels: Gravity, The Surgeon, Harvest, The Apprentice. Unfortunately, The Sinner does not carry with it the same level of suspense and excitement that has made her other titles absolute page-turners. In fact, there is nearly no suspense involved for the first 3/4 of the book, as the mystery tying together 3 seemingly unrelated crime scenes is unraveled at a painfully prolonged pace. Yes, this is more of an average quality murder mystery novel than the characteristically excellent medical thriller that has made Gerritsen a multiple-time New York Times bestselling author. Although The Sinner certainly is readable, I would recommend spending your time on one of Gerritsen's more acclaimed titles instead.

It's Labor Day weekend. Lots of outside plans. Lots of unexpected rain...and...

...that's a very good thing. Instead of walking the craft fair and barbequing...I got to stay in and read...the whole book.

I have read both other books in this series, The Surgeon and The Apprentice...and The Sinner...is definitely my favorite to date. Very interesting plot, intermingling of characters, alot of twists and turns.

I'm not an avid fad of reviews that tell you alot about a book so I won't.

It's a great mystery/thriller.

Just enjoy. I know I did.

I'll keep it short and to the point. The story itself would be OK, but this book is so incredibly wordy, I found myself saying "shut up and get on with it" too often. The author details everything, and what's worse, is redundant. I don't need to hear that the priest has strikingly blue eyes every time he's injected into the story. The story is further damaged by the reading of Dennis Boutsikaris. Any sentence that started with "yes" or "no" was articulated ridiculously. Nobody talks like that and it gets very irritating very quickly listening to someone read like this. I only finished these CD's because I invested too much time listening to the first 3 while giving it a chance. Strip away all of the nonsense and tell the story with a little more precision and it would be a pretty good book. But with the extreme excessive wordiness, I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone.

Okay, first off when I started reading this book I was leary about it. The church and all these bad things happening with in it. I finally got past that it was just a book and read the story for what it was a story. The book went fast and keep me intersted the whole time. I thought I knew who the bad guy was but I was wrong a couple of times and then I gave up trying to figure it out. You will no know who the bad person is until you get to the last few chapters!! AHhhhhhhHH! It was a great read completely. The characters keep getting richer and richer with each book in the series. Jane is amazing and Maura is also amazing in her own ways and she is growing more and more throughout this book. I can't wait to start Body Double the next book in the series! Happy reading! Heather

In a remote leper village in India Howard Redfield photographs the dead. He's afraid, and well he should be because what he photographs here will ultimately lead to his murder in Boston a year later. There are secrets that some will kill to protect.

It's snowing, Christmas is close, when Boston M.E. Maura Isles gets the call to go out and investigate the murder in a contemplative order of nuns. She finds Detective Jane Rizzoli at the scene, learns that novice Sister Camille has been brutally murdered and that aging Sister Ursala has been horribly beaten. As it turns out the killer was after Sister Ursala and had thought he'd finished her, but how could he know that the nun had a congenital birth defect, one of her carotid arteries didn't pump blood, so when he checked for a pulse, he found none.

A woman is found dead in a seedier part of town. Her face has been ripped away, her hands and feet had been severed. Maura deduces Hanson's disease, leprosy. The killer hadn't been taking trophies, after all. He'd been trying to hid the illness. From the disease they guess the victim might have been from India. Sister Ursala had worked for a couple years with a group of lepers in India. Was there a connection?

Then Howard Redfield turns up dead.

This book, one of Tess Gerritsen's best, is a thriller of the first order, a mystery full of red herrings that will keep you guessing as you burn through the pages, and there is even that special touch of romance for Rizzoli that will touch your heart, even if you're a guy.

I've got to admit this is a fairly interesting read. But as a Tess Gerritsen fan who has been with her since her first medical mystery, HARVEST, I find the trend of her latest three books disturbing, particularly this one. This is the third time we have Detective Jane Rizzoli and the second time Medical Examiner Maura Isles; and the teaser plus the "Look Inside" for Gerritsen's next book, BODY DOUBLE, show me we're going to have this same pair together again. Gerritsen seems to be turning into a typical series author; and I, for one, think that would be a great shame for a writer of her talents.

Having Rizzoli in both THE SURGEON and THE APPRENTICE made sense since THE APPRENTICE is an excellent sequel to THE SURGEON with the same baddie hooked up with a new one. But with THE SINNER she uses the same pair of heroines to try and solve a crime done by baddies that are totally unrelated to those two stories. What I enjoyed about a Gerritsen medical mystery in the past was that with each new book she would take us to totally different settings peopled with totally different characters. That's a lot harder for a writer to do, but it makes for a far more interesting read for me than those dealing with heroes and settings I've already experienced umpteen times. So, as I was reading THE SINNER, I found myself getting increasingly bored with the character and problems of Jane Rizzoli.

I'm sure I'll read BODY DOUBLE when it comes out in mass paperback, too. But after reading THE SINNER, I'm not looking forward to reading it with anywhere near the anticipation I had with Gerritsen's earlier medical thrillers.