THE KILLING PLACE

In snowbound Wyoming the village of kingdom Come stands abandoned, meals lie half eaten on kitchen tables, windows and doors stand open; it is as if the residents vanished into thin air. Driving through the area with friends pathologist Maura Isles finds herself trapped in the eerie community, this is just the start of the nightmare. Before long one member of the group has been seriously injured and they are all at the mercy of an unseen enemy prepared to kill to make sure the dark secret of Kingdom Come is kept.

Calling a novel a ‘page turner’ usually means dusting down one of the more tired clichés in the reviewer’s toolkit, in the case of the Killing Place though the term seems to fit perfectly.

This is both a first rate thriller tackling the strange and often autocratic religious communities that abound in rural America and a gripping story about the struggle of the characters to survive in an unforgiving wilderness. That alone would make the book worth reading, an extra dimension is added to this by Gerritsen taking her established characters out of their familiar settings and testing their relationships to the limit.

As ever the forensic and procedural aspects are faultlessly accurate and the final plot twist neatly turns everything that went before on its head in a way that is all too believable. Thirteen books into her career Tess Gerritsen is still at the top of her game and on the evidence of this novel will continue to be one of the writers who set the pace for everyone else to beat for some time yet.