Tess Gerritsen’s “The Silent Girl” is the best Rizzoli and Isles novel I’ve read to date. It is extremely well-written, one of those tense “compulsive reads”, and really eerie in spots. In case I’m being obscure: I really, really like this book.

Billy, the guide of a ghost tour in Boston’s Chinatown, leads a group to the Red Phoenix, a restaurant that has been closed for years, a restaurant where one evening the chef murdered four people, then killed himself. Billy shivers as the group enters the area thinking “Even on warm summer nights, he always felt cold here, as if a chill had long ago settled in the alley, never to dissipate.” Then, while Billy tells the story of the Red Phoenix, a young boy in the tour group finds a severed body part. The discovery leads to the body of a new victim, unearths questions about what really happened at the restaurant on that night long ago, and opens a new murder investigation for Detective Jane Rizzoli and her partner, Barry Frost.

The enigmatic young Detective Johnny Tam, “the generic Chinese guy”, is pulled into the investigation to help Rizzoli and Frost navigate through Chinatown and its residents. The three of them encounter the relatives of the Red Phoenix murder victims as they look into the new murder, and soon they realize other victims and other crimes might be attached to both the abandoned restaurant crimes and their current case. Along the way, Rizzoli educates herself on Chinese mythical figures and finds herself in several dangerous situations that involve, well, involve, something that is just out of their sight. The detectives are perhaps haunted, perhaps stalked, by a ghostly presence: “It was merely a flutter of black on black, like the wing of a giant bird flapping against the sky.”

In addition to the Chinatown murder investigation, Dr. Maura Isles must deal with being ostracized by police officers she has worked with for years after she will not compromise forensic pathology testimony in the trial of a policeman accused of murdering a suspect. She has violated the rules of the thin blue line. In this thriller, both Rizzoli and Isles must make decisions about loyalty, right and wrong, and keeping silent or speaking up. The ethics of their choices are nearly as interesting as the central plot. Don’t miss this novel. And if you don’t want to say, “It’s Chinatown, Jane” after you finish reading it, you haven’t watched all the Jack Nicholson movies you should have.

I recommend this book to every fan of Tess Gerritsen. From beginning to end she lures you in like a moth to a flame. Then when you least expect it you realize who the killer or killers are and you like whattttt!

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