The Sinner by Tess Gerritsen

by Hoard Member Jessica Cornish on 01/21/08 No Comments

This Book Is About

Front cover of The Sinner

Not even the icy temperatures of a typical New England winter can match the bone-chilling scene of carnage discovered in the early morning hours at the chapel of Our Lady of Divine Light. Within the sanctuary walls of the cloistered convent, now stained with blood, lie two nuns-one dead, one critically injured-victims of an unspeakably savage attacker. The brutal crime appears to be without motive, and the elderly nuns in residence can offer little help in the police investigation. But medical examiner Maura Isle’s autopsy of the dead woman yields shocking surprise: Twenty-year-old Sister Camille, the order’s sole novice, gave birth before she was murdered. Then the disturbing case takes a stunning new turn when another woman is found murdered is an abandoned building, her body mutilated beyond recognition.

Together, Isles and homicide detective Jane Rizzoli uncover an ancient horror that connects these terrible slaughters. As long-buried secrets come to light, Maura Isles finds herself drawn inexorably toward the heart of an investigation that strikes closer and closer to home-and toward a dawning revelation about the killer’s identity too shattering to consider.

Skip to Ratings » Skip to Book Info » Buy This Book »

My Thoughts On This Book

This fiction novel, though the main story is a homicide mystery, is also the story of two women who have to balance their personal lives with the violence and death of their jobs for the New England Homicide Department. Though the author is also known for writing romance, the inclusion of the two main characters’ personal lives does not overwhelm the main plot. The author managed to weave two minor personal plots along with the various twist and turns directions that the homicide cases lead the protagonists.

The Sinner was an enjoyable crime novel, with some interesting descriptive morgue talk worthy of CSI (though I have to say that it’s a lot easier to eat and watch CSI than it is to read the descriptions of the sounds and sights of the morgue, oddly enough). I gave this book 4.5 burning villages for violence, but not all for on screen action. I felt that the gore rating mentioned in the definitions of our rating system justified the number of burning villages as there is a lot of grotesque dead bodies and descriptive morgue talk. The Sinner was well written and had a suspenseful ending that had me not wanting to put it down.

Although I really did enjoy this book I would most likely not read this book again, though I will read the other books in the author’s series.