Last to Die

July 16, 2012
At the start of Gerritsen’s pulse-pounding 10th thriller featuring Det. Jane Rizzoli of the Boston PD and her close friend, pathologist Maura Isles (after 2011’s The Silent Girl), an unidentified narrator describes her hunt for a person nicknamed Icarus, a fiend who has sought refuge in a villa outside Rome, Italy. The scene shifts to Ithaca, N.Y., where 13-year-old Claire Ward survives a car crash that kills her foster parents, then to rural New Hampshire, where 14-year-old Will Yablonski’s aunt and uncle perish in an explosion that destroys their farmhouse. When a similar slaughter that leaves one foster child alive occurs on Boston’s Beacon Hill, Rizzoli and Isles get the case. The high-pressure assignment doesn’t delay Isles’s Maine vacation plans, but her time away from Boston turns out to be a highly unpleasant and risky busman’s holiday. Gerritsen pulls things together nicely by the end as she crafts several sequences that will leave readers anxious about the outcome. Agent: Meg Ruley, Jane Rotrosen Agency.