Released in August
by Ballantine /Random House, "I Know a Secret" is another
suspenseful, beautifully structured addition to the series, in which the pair confront
a serial killer while Medical Examiner Maura Isles' very own family serial
killer—her mother—is dying of cancer, still mean to her end. Then, there's
Isles' long-term love relationship with a priest, the lingering blows of a
long-ago childcare abuse scandal, and Boston Detective Jane Rizzoli's desperate
attempt to save her feuding parents' marriage.
Nothing is as it
seems, and Gerritsen skillfully keeps the reader guessing until the end, a
prerequisite to a good suspense novel.
Yet, Gerritsen said
in a recent interview, she sits down with pen and paper to write first drafts,
and doesn't plan them out ahead of time. Gerritsen is 64, lives in Camden, Maine,
but knows the Boston life well. She keeps it in the background as Isles and
Rizzoli struggle to figure out all the puzzling aspects of their lives.
"I never plot
things out ahead of time. This is my 27th book (12 in the R&I series). I
start writing and see where the story goes. Sometimes it takes an abrupt left-hand
turn, and that gets fixed in the third or fourth rewrite. I don't show it to
anyone until it's ready. I write the first draft by hand, let the story find
itself. By the end, I finally know what the book is really about. About two-thirds
or three-quarters of the way, I find out who the bad guy is. I have a simple
premise when it starts. As I write, new things start to pop up, just as happens
with a normal (criminal) investigation. By the time I'm finished, it's there."
After working about
a year on "I Have a Secret," Garritsen, a resident of Maine, has been
touring with its release. She recently wrapped up a tour in the United Kingdom
and is flying from city to city across the U.S. But this may be her last such
tour for the series.
"I feel like I've
tied up a lot of loose emotional threads that have been going on for several
stories," she said. "Right now, I'm working on something completely
different. After awhile, a series comes to an end. I wanted to find out whether
they become happy, how Jane and Maura's lives go. The series has always been
about these two women, and once they're both happy, the series will be
over." She thinks that time may have come, and she anticipates returning
to her new book.
She began writing mysteries because she loved them as a child (any
other Nancy Drew fans out there?) and has based Rizzoli and Isles on her own
experiences ("because I'm a doctor, that's fairly easy for me to
research"). At the beginning, she interviewed people at Boston's homicide
unit. "But not since then; I pretty much focus on the pathologist end, and
my husband is a part-time medical examiner in our county in Maine."
She began writing while on maternity leave, and her first novel,
"Call After Midnight," came out in 1987. Eight more followed as she dug
full-time into writing. She also wrote the screenplay, "Adrift,"
which became a 1993 TV movie with Kate Jackson.
Her first medical thriller, "Harvest," came out in 1996.
In "I Know a Secret," the duo are again played against a conscienceless
personality. "Sociopaths are out there," she said; "there's
nothing you can do about that. Sociopaths have no empathy, do not care about
human begins, and think of how they can use them as tools. Some people are born
sociopaths; that's the way their brain works. They're just some kind of
creature—like predators in the animal kingdom." She considers Warren Hoyt,
whom readers and viewers will remember, one of the most evil characters she's
created, because Warren is smart, and a psychopath—the extreme entity of
sociopathy. "He thrives on the pain of other people; he's formidable
because he's so incredibly intelligent. Evil, stupid people are not such an
antagonist to worry about, but he looked at everybody else as prey."
Holly, the antagonist in Gerritsen's latest book, knows herself well. "For
now, I must walk the straight and narrow," she tells readers at one point.
"I must pretend to be the good girl who neither steals nor cheats … (but) I
am what I am, and no one can watch me forever." Gerritsen calls Holly
"a sociopath who gets by. She doesn't go out of her way to be evil, it's just
that the things she does, she just goes about them without thinking."
Growing up in San Diego, the author finished undergraduate work in
anthropology at Stanford before completing medical degrees at the University of
California, San Francisco. "I practiced medicine for about 10 years, a lot
of it part-time, because I became a mom pretty quickly. I always wanted to be a
writer, even when I was seven years old, but my father encouraged me to go into
medicine instead. He kept telling me there's no way to make a living as a
writer, but when you're a writer you're going to keep at it." He did not
live to see her success, a disappointment to Gerritsen, who said, "I wish
he'd been alive long enough."
He would have seen that all the preparation formed steps to an end: pieces
in a literary puzzle.
"You never know which experience is going to fit into your future,"
she said. "I didn't know my interest in anthropology would come up again
and again in my books, or that medicine would add all the details that it has.
Being a writer, you must be curious about many topics, and always be reading."
Gerritsen has always been interested in the collision of truth and
nonsense. "That crazy satanic movement that went around the country … A
lot of people ended up in jail based on children's strange memories of adults flying
on brooms, riding tigers, etc. It spread to the U.S. and other places in the
world. There was this strange idea that devil worshippers were everywhere."
Elements of the scandal form a subplot in the book. "I'm fascinated by how
people turn away from science and look at superstition—and all these things
become the foundation of their lives," she said. "It's surprising how
easy it is to let go of facts and accept fantasy."
As a writer, she gets more satisfaction out of less formulaic books.
"I had a novel, 'Gravity,' about the international space station."
The novel was published in 1999, and the concept allegedly became the framework
of a later movie by the same name—leading to a complicated breach of contract
lawsuit, which she urges writers to check out on her web page, as a warning to
all writers who sign rights away to a company.
"I also really loved
writing 'The Bone Garden.' The books I love the most, put my heart and soul
into, are the ones that did not find an audience. Somehow the popular audience
doesn’t seem to like them." Does this discourage her? "All the
time," she said. "Every time you write a book you want it to be the
very best it can be, and very often the acceptance isn't there. We just keep
plugging away because we tell the stories we want to tell."
When her tour ends, Gerritsen will return to writing. She dubs her
latest book a "sexy" thriller with a ghost. It's nearly done.
She is also working on a film with her son, 35, a documentary film
maker. "We're making a feature documentary about the age-old relationship
between humans and pigs," she said. "We're interested in why some
people refuse to eat them, why some people have such negative feelings while
others love their pigs. We're going to explore the strong emotions, track archeological
reasons Jews don't eat pork, for instance." The reason may not be Biblical
at all, she said. "There was climate change at the time. The Holy Land
became a desert fairly quickly, and pigs need water."
Their first project together was a horror film, "Island
Zero." She loved working with her son. "We had such a good time
making a movie together, we thought we'd follow it up."
Today's creative climate lends itself to all kinds of project ideas.
"It's a funny time because you don't need a publisher to be published
anymore," she said; "in some ways it's harder to get attention, but
in other ways it's easier. With (self-publishing) it's a lot harder to get people
to pay attention to what you've just written."
Her favorite authors, by the way, share the same first name: "I'm
going to plug the three Lisas," she said: "Lisa Unger, Lisa Scott and
Lisa Gardner." She loves the suspense of a good mystery, rather than the
heavy-action sequences of modern thrillers (She's a fan of classic horror films
like "The Birds," "The Mummy" and "Them." In a
good mystery, she said, "You're left worrying about what's going to
happen."
Apparently, the world agrees. Her novels are award winners, published
around the world and continually on the best-seller lists.
