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Book Summary and Reviews of The Silent Girl by Tess Gerritsen

The Silent Girl by Tess Gerritsen

The Silent Girl

A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

by Tess Gerritsen

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  • Jul 2011, 336 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

Every crime scene tells a story. Some keep you awake at night. Others haunt your dreams. The grisly display homicide cop Jane Rizzoli finds in Boston's Chinatown will do both.

In the murky shadows of an alley lies a female's severed hand. On the tenement rooftop above is the corpse belonging to that hand, a red-haired woman dressed all in black, her head nearly severed. Two strands of silver hair - not human - cling to her body. They are Rizzoli's only clues, but they're enough for her and medical examiner Maura Isles to make the startling discovery: that this violent death had a chilling prequel.

Nineteen years earlier, a horrifying murder-suicide in a Chinatown restaurant left five people dead. But one woman connected to that massacre is still alive: a mysterious martial arts master who knows a secret she dares not tell, a secret that lives and breathes in the shadows of Chinatown. A secret that may not even be human. Now she's the target of someone, or something, deeply and relentlessly evil.

Cracking a crime resonating with bone-chilling echoes of an ancient Chinese legend, Rizzoli and Isles must outwit an unseen enemy with centuries of cunning - and a swift, avenging blade.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Rizzoli and Isles are likable and industrious, as always, and Gerritsen seems more engaged this time out, her prose livelier, and her dialogue more memorable." - Booklist

"...[B]oth women deal with personal and family issues that reveal their humanity and lend credibility to this deft thriller." - Publishers Weekly

"...[D]escribed in the blood-curdling graphic style that has successfully carried these two characters through numerous New York Times best sellers to their ninth outing here." - Library Journal

This information about The Silent Girl was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Reader Reviews

Write your own reviewwrite your own review

Wanda downs

Silent girl
An excellent story line. Did not want to put it down.

Cloggie Downunder

thoroughly enjoyable Gerritsen page-turner
The Silent Girl is the 9th book in Tess Gerritsen’s Rizzoli/Isles series. A severed hand found in a Chinatown alley leads Jane Rizzoli to the owner of the hand on a rooftop: a woman almost decapitated. Investigation eventually links the body with a murder/suicide nineteen years earlier in a Chinatown restaurant that left five people dead. As Rizzoli and her team review the case, it appears that one woman connected to the massacre, a martial arts master, is unconvinced about the conclusions made in that investigation. Gerritsen once again gives us an imaginative plot with twists to the very last chapter, realistic characters and authentic dialogue. The feel of Chinatown and the Chinese mindset are deftly portrayed, obviously from first-hand knowledge. Once again, we are presented with a wealth of interesting facts in an easy-to-assimilate form, this time about hair analysis, ancient Chinese weaponry, metal analysis, Chinese legend & folklore and running amok. Gerritsen touches on police brutality, prejudice, collective guilt of an ethnic group, sexual predators, Chinese language and the Irish Mafia. The antics of Rizzoli’s family once again provide some lighter moments, and Johnny Tam, a Chinese-born detective seconded to help out, makes a laugh-out-loud statement: “I wish I could speak Cantonese, but it’s like Greek to me”. I noticed that Maura’s autopsy measurements were in centimetres rather than inches and I wondered if this is usual practice in this field in USA. A character from Maura’s adventure in The Killing Place makes a welcome appearance. Once again, a thoroughly enjoyable Gerritsen page-turner: I look forward to the next Rizzoli/Isles instalment.

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Author Information

Tess Gerritsen Author Biography

Photo © Brian Velenchenko

International bestselling author Tess Gerritsen took an unusual route to a writing career. A Stanford University graduate, Tess went on to gain her MD at the University of California, San Francisco. While on maternity leave as a physician, she began to write fiction. She published her first novel in 1987 and has since sold over forty million copies of books in forty countries, winning the Nero Wolfe Award and the RITA Award. Her novels have been top-three US bestsellers and number one bestsellers abroad. Critics worldwide praise her novels as "pulse-pounding fun" (Philadelphia Inquirer), "scary and brilliant" (Toronto Globe and Mail), and "polished, riveting prose" (Chicago Tribune). Publishers Weekly has dubbed her the "medical suspense queen." Her series featuring homicide detective Jane...

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