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In BLOODSTREAM, her third medical thriller following HARVEST and LIFE SUPPORT, Tess
Gerritsen has penned her best yet. Everything about this book --- from characters to plot
to setting to the medical mystery at its heart --- shows Gerritsen's continuing
development as a writer.
Claire Eliot is a young widow with a teenage son named Noah; she is also a doctor, a GP in
the field of family medicine. BLOODSTREAM begins when Claire and Noah have been living for
eight months in a small lakeside town in Maine, called Tranquility. Claire has bought the
practice of the old town doc and has thus acquired all the problems one might expect in
such a situation --- plus a few nobody could ever expect. It is the month of November, in
a year of strange weather, marked by an unusually wet spring and an unusually hot summer
(sound familiar, anyone?). Odd, violent things begin to happen in the town of Tranquility
with its population of 900 souls.
After a while, people begin to remember that these same odd things happened before, a long
time ago. Some old bones are found along the banks of a stream that feeds the lake ---
these bones test out to be even older than anyone living can remember, and they bear
markings of similar violence. Finally there are the Indian legends --- and all this adds
up to a tantalizing, if horrifying, puzzle.
What is particularly gripping, wrenching, about this book is that the odd things and
violence involve the town's teenagers. Throughout BLOODSTREAM there are parallels to
headlines that have been occurring in our newspapers in 1998 --- to such a degree that
it's almost eerie, considering Gerritsen has to have written the book at least a year
"before" our current epidemic of teenage violence broke out --- not to mention
the strangeness of El Nino's effect on our weather.
The claustrophobic atmosphere of the small Maine town is convincingly portrayed, along
with the townspeople's stubborn denial of their violent past. Claire is an appealing
character --- most of the story is told from her point of view --- and along with her we
feel the frustrations that inevitably occur when the one who can see most clearly is the
outsider, the person "from away." She has an affecting relationship with another
appealing character, the town police chief, Lincoln Kelly. Noah, her son, has a touching
teenage first love in Amelia, whose brothers are one heap of trouble. We become as
involved with these characters as we are with the puzzle of what is happening, what is the
medical mystery to be unravelled here.
The ending does not disappoint, except that for me it came too soon. I wanted to read on,
to know more about Lincoln and Claire and Noah and Amelia. I did not want to say goodbye
to them. I wanted to stay in Tranquility until the spring came and I could be sure that
the evil really did go away with the darkness of the long Maine winter.
BLOODSTREAM is an absorbing and rewarding read.
--- Reviewed by Dianne Day
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