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Body Double, Tess Gerritsen
Bantam
Reviewed by Sheila Forbes (Courtesy of Taranaki Daily News)

Forensic pathologists are flavour of the month in crime writing. This one spares us the minute and gruesome details we find in some novels and on TV.

Pathologist Maura Isles arrives back from a Paris conference to find a woman has been shot in a car parked outside her home. As if that is not shock enough, the woman, Anna Jessop, turns out to be Maura's double, and tests prove them in fact to have been twins. A puzzling detail is that Anna appears from records to have existed for only the previous two years. While Maura is aware of having been adopted as a baby, she has no knowledge of a twin sister.

The big question is whether the bullet was meant for Maura or Anna. While homicide detective Jane Rizzoli deals with the murder, Maura, with the help of Detective Rick Ballard, who knew her sister, and to whom she is increasingly attracted, attempts to find answers to more personal questions as she investigates her sister's background and tries to track down their birth mother.

While this is happening, Mattie Purvis, heavily pregnant and unkindly treated by her selfish and faithless husband, is knocked out and kidnapped. She awakens to find herself buried in a wooden box with barely enough room to move, yet supplied with food, water, a breathing hole and a torch. As she comes to realise there has been no ransom demand, she puzzles frantically over the reason for her capture and resolves to make a fight for her survival.

Meanwhile, the murder investigation moves to Anna's temporary home and reveals not only more human remains, but also a disturbing pattern of disappearances of pregnant women. Thus the two apparently unconnected events are linked in a horrifying series of crimes.

Agatha Christie was fond of choosing the least likely character, and often one who had been barely mentioned, as the murderer. In a modern crime novel I regard this as something of a cop-out.

This is an unusual story and Gerritsen maintains the tension well, but be prepared for a less than convincing end.