In Tess Gerritsen's The Sinner, published by Ballantine Books in 2003, Rizzoli and Isles are summoned to a convent to investigate the murder of a young religious novice. An older nun has been assaulted as well, and remains in a coma at a nearby hospital. When Dr. Isles performs the autopsy on the novice, however, she discovers that the young woman had given birth shortly before her death. Was the young nun murdered to cover up a potential scandal? And what has become of her infant?
Dr. Isles' Love Life in The Sinner
In the course of working the case, Dr. Isles meets the man who will become her forbidden love interest for most of the "Rizzoli and Isles" series of novels. The handsome priest, Daniel Brophy, is at first a suspect in the young novice's death. Who would be most likely to get a nun pregnant, and do anything to hide his guilt? But as Maura Isles gets to know him, she becomes increasingly convinced that Father Brophy could never have done such a thing. Not only that, he begins to challenge her long-held agnosticism.
Dr. Isles is distracted from Father Brophy during the course of the novel because her ex-husband, Dr. Victor Banks, arrives to visit and to woo her. They divorced after his affair with one of his staff members. Though Dr. Isles moves close to renewing their relationship and allows him back to her bed, it soon becomes apparent that Victor is involved in the young nun's murder--but to what degree, Dr. Isles cannot be sure. His charity work, providing medical help to patients in poor countries, is funded by the same organization that the older nun worked for--and she dies in the hospital, under mysterious circumstances.
Rizzoli's Preoccupation in The Sinner
Meanwhile, Detective Rizzoli is feeling a certain amount of identification with the young dead novice. As she works the case, she is fighting nausea, and eventually summons the courage to take a pregnancy test. It seems her torrid encounter with FBI Agent Gabriel Dean in The Apprentice has produced a lingering consequence, and she must decide what she wants to do about the pregnancy.
Though Dr. Isles comes up with the necessary forensic evidence once the body of the novice's newborn is found, Rizzoli is the one who tracks down the man who impregnated the young nun against her will, and sees that he suffers for his crime in a harrowing scene of emotional confrontation.
Review of The Sinner
As usual, Gerritsen provides a thrilling read in The Sinner. What starts out as a mystery confined to a small Boston convent turns out to have international implications traced to a catastrophe in India. Unlike the first two novels, in this book it is Dr. Isles who manages to escape danger by a hair's breadth. She does not, however, escape damage to her heart.
Indeed, it is the insight The Sinner provides into the characters of its two heroines that makes it more than just a page-turner. Hopefully, some of the supporting characters from this book will eventually find their way (or way back, in the case of Gabriel Dean) to the television series based on Gerritsen's novels, Rizzoli and Isles.
Elizabeth Thomas - Elizabeth was born and raised in Mt. Clemens, Michigan, though she now lives in a suburb of Austin, Texas. She holds a bachelor's and ...
