The Mephisto Club

Author: Tess Gerritsen
Publisher: Bantam
Publication Year: 2006
Genre: Murder Mystery | Suspense | Thriller
Rating: 2

“‘You can study a face all you want, but you never really know what lies beneath the mask.’”

Tess Gerritsen has always been an auto-buy author for me. After reading my first Gerritsen novel, I was beyond attached to her characters and the TV series is also such a great pleasure to watch! Naturally, my deep love for Tess Gerritsen novels comes from her awesome ability to grip the reader and make it practically impossible to put the book down. Her plots are usually always thrilling and her writing is sharp. Her ability to mislead the readers is impressive and she almost always manages to surprise me at the end. Her characters are always on point, as well, and even though we’re only six books into the series, I’m already deeply attached to them all and what their future may hold.

I used “usually” a lot during the previous statement because while I usually enjoy Gerritsen’s novel. However this one did not hold the same grasp on me as the others did. This, I believe, is down to the supernatural themes running through this tale and the lack of any real suspense. Before we are even halfway through the novel we’re told the identity of the killer, removing the joy of being able to solve the cases ourselves, as it may be. Now I wouldn’t mind this as much if she’d written it as she had the Surgeon, where she managed to make those parts interesting by showing the reader the inside of the killer’s mind. Here it just seems rather drab. We are shown brief parts of a child’s mind and we never get to experience the adult thoughts.

Additionally Gerritsen’s attempt to involve the supernatural was rather lacking, in my opinion. If she was trying to spark an idea within her readers that perhaps there is a greater evil out there, then she has not done a very good job. There is very little here to really convince us of this ‘second species’ that live alongside us humans. I think she could have done a lot more than was done.

All together, I don’t think that this was that much of an enjoyable Rizzoli and Isles novel. It did capture my attention but I was able to leave it for hours at a time and not feel like I needed to find out what happens next, as I have felt with her previous novels. If you’re looking for a first time Gerritsen read, I wouldn’t recommend this one.