Date published August 23, 2005
ISBN 978-0345476975
Romantic Suspense
Hardcover
Reviewed by Gina
With no future for herself in Russia, Mila puts all her hopes in a good life in the United States. She arrives with several other women in Mexico City and while surprised that the men that pick them up at the airport demand their passports, she goes along with them. After all, she has a bright future in the United States. Right?
Wrong. Within hours of her arrival, trekking across the desert in a van, the travelers come to a stop in the middle of no where. Ordered out of the van, Mila is stunned to see several men approach them and demand the women remove their clothes. Mila isn’t deemed desirable enough to draw the men’s attention and she watches in horror as the others are brutally raped—her friend shot and killed when she tries to escape. So begins a life of horror that Mila never imagined would be hers.
Nine months pregnant, her baby due any day now, Detective Jane Rizzoli sits on the witness stand testifying for the prosecution when a suspect goes a bit too far, attacks his attorney and makes a break for it. When no one else seems to be responding, Jane makes her way to the suspect and takes him down. The drama is short lived when, in the middle of the arrest, her water breaks.
Medical Examiner Maura Isles is about ready to pack it in and head home for the night. Making one last pass through the morgue’s freezer she is startled to hear a noise. Since she’s the only living person in the icy chamber, it’s not like one of the bodies could have made it, right?
In an accident of fate, these three women come together in perhaps the most dramatic of Tess Gerritsen’s Jane Rizzoli/Maura Isles books yet. Just when I think I’ve read the best this amazing author can write, she turns out a book that is more gripping than the one before. In VANISH, Ms. Gerritsen weaves a story that is reminiscent of her earlier book, HARVEST in terms of luring unsuspecting innocents into a world fraught with deception and proof of the strength of the human spirit. With the non-stop action one finds in Ms. Gerritsen’s medical thrillers and Rizzoli/Isles books, the slice of humor in the court room when Jane’s baby is about to make her appearance, is amusing. Only Jane Rizzoli can take down a criminal one moment and stand above him with her water breaking the next. Readers also learn a bit more about Jane’s family and just how close the family truly is in their entertaining visit to the hospital when baby Regina is born as well as when Angela, her mom, comes to help Jane take care of the newborn. Ms. Gerritsen captures the family dynamic and shows it to the readers with style.
When Jane bumbles into the waiting area of the diagnostic imaging department just after Mila’s friend, Olena, has taken several people hostage, the reader feels the intensity of Jane’s anxiety knowing with each passing moment Olena will discover that Jane is a cop. Not just any cop, but a homicide detective. The anguish Jane’s husband, FBI Gabriel Dean feels knowing his wife is held hostage as well at his rage at the blond bimbo reporter who tells the world Jane is a copy is palpable.
Just when a reader thinks he or she has seen Ms. Gerritsen deliver the coup de grace of twists and turns in a story, she surprises once again. In VANISH, the suspect is a true surprise; the ending satisfying.
The only problem I can ever find in a Gerritsen novel is when that final page is turned and the story ends. This is one author that always leaves me wanting more.
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