Meet Tess Gerritsen in Auckland tomorrow night!

BEST-SELLING INTERNATIONAL crime writer Tess Gerritsen will be making the first of only two public events during her New Zealand visit at the Women's Bookshop in Ponsonby, Auckland, tomorrow night. It's a great opportunity to meet the physician-turned-author who has won critical acclaim and sold more than 20 million copies of her thrillers worldwide. As the legendary Carole Beu of the Women's Bookshop says, Gerritsen is "gripping , gory & glorious! She's one of the world's great crime writers & she'll be in our bookshop!"

I recently read Gerritsen's latest Rizzoli and Isles thriller, THE SILENT GIRL (released this month), which is the first of her novels to ever touch on her own Asian-American heritage in any major way. Here's a blurb:

In the murky shadows of an alley in Boston's Chinatown a hand has been discovered. On the rooftop above lies a woman's severed head. Two strands of silver hair - not human - cling to the body that lies nearby.

These are Detective Jane Rizzoli's only clues, but they are enough for her and Dr Maura Isles to make a startling discovery: that this violent death had a chilling prequel.

Seventeen years early a horrifying attack in a Boston restaurant left five people dead. Only one woman connected to the massacre is now still alive - a mysterious martial arts master who knows a secret she dare not tell. A secret that lives and breathes in the shadows of the city. A secret that may not even be human.

It soon becomes clear than an ancient evil is stirring in Chinatown: an evil that has killed before, and will kill again - unless Jane and Maura can track it down, and defeat it.

I really, really enjoyed THE SILENT GIRL (much more than last year's THE KILLING PLACE), and I'm looking forward to hearing Tess Gerritsen talk about it at the Women's Bookshop tomorrow night.

An evening with Tess Gerritsen
The Women's Bookshop
105 Ponsonby Road, Auckland
6pm. Refreshments provided.

Carole Beu and her team always put on great events at the Women's Bookshop (I really enjoyed the Val McDermid evening there last year), so it should be a terrific night. Hope to see some of you there