#BlogTour-‘The Shape Of Night’ by Tess Gerritsen

About the book…

We’ve all done things we’re ashamed of . . . When Ava arrives at Brodie’s Watch, she thinks she has found the perfect place to hide from her past. Something terrible happened, something she is deeply ashamed of, and all she wants is to forget. But the old house on the hill both welcomes and repels her and Ava quickly begins to suspect she is not alone. Either that or she is losing her mind. The house is full of secrets, but is the creeping sense of danger coming from within its walls, or from somewhere else entirely?

Huge thanks to Anne Cater of Random Things for the blog tour invite and Transworld Publishers for my gifted review copy.

And now, the tricky part-how to write a review without spoilers…

If I was to try and categorise this book, I would say it falls somewhere between an semi-erotic Scooby Doo-esque tale and The Ghost And Mrs Muir.

Before you recoil in horror, let me explain…

You have Ava, a cookery writer who moves to Tucker’s Cove in Maine, to an old mansion once owned, and built by one salty sea dog-Jeremiah Brodie. The house , named Brodie’s Watch, is unwelcoming at first but agent Donna woos Ava over and tells her, frankly, it is tourist season and she should be so lucky to get somewhere else. Desperate to escape some to-be-revealed trauma, and also finish a book which is a year past being written, she takes it on depsite her better judgement.

The creaky, rotten looking widow’s walk gives a foreshadowing , great big ‘Ruh Roh’ to the reader, and our suspicions are correct when one of the handymen doing the renovations on the place, tells her a young girl fell to her death from there.

On top of that, Jeremiah was lost at sea and whilst he was on land, he had a scurrilous reputation as a bit of blackguard, according to letters found in the local museum.

Ava is obviously escaping from some kind of awful trauma to stay in a potentially haunted house but being a rational type of person, she ignores anything odd going on to focus on her writing.

Until , that is, she is visited in a most delightful way by a man shaped darkness that does rude things in the night, which leaves her wanting more whilst simultaneously confused about whether it a longing which has manifested this presence, her alcohol consumption or her grief .

The only hints she has to go on are that her cat acts oddly before this spirit appears, and there is a smell of the ocean which precedes his increasingly corporeal appearance.

Oh boy!

The mystery deepens as she repeatedly tries to contact the previous woman who stayed there, intrigue abounds as Ava digs further into the past of both the town of Tucker’s Cove and its notorious sea captain.

So she does the only rational thing and hires a medium, knowing in her heart that the spectral presence is Jeremiah Brodie. Her dreams become increasingly vivid, until the point at which the medium,Maeve, becoming alarmed, literally breaks down her door and finds her unconscious, on the floor, dehydrated and in a state of undress.

And then a body is washed up from the sea…

Is it a ghost or Ava’s fevered imagination that has conjured these visits from a spectre? Has the cat scratch on her arm left her with a septic fever dream of the dashing pirate type?

What does he want from her? And how can she stop it-if, indeed, she even wants it to stop…

My problem with this book is that I was expecting a Tess Gerritsen novel, and whilst it is really well written, in the main, I felt Ava was such a damp squib of a protagonist that I wasn’t bothered if she actually made it to the end of the book. The small town nuances,however, are so well captured- I immediately related to the whole outsider looking in perspective.

It was the pseudo erotic scenes that made me sigh-and not in a good way.

I am no prude, but how many descriptions of nipples hardening does a reader need?! We women have a million other erogenous points that will set us off like a firecracker, why go for her nipples? We get it, she was aroused, she does not need to be described as constantly sopping wet- this wore thin very quickly.

It was bouncing from soft core sex, to posible murders, an actual murder, to ghosts and then attempts at redemption in the space of a few pages, and back again, that kept yanking me out of the storyline. As a reader, I wanted to care more about Ava, but sadly I did not. I expected scares or chills or a mystery from the novel outline and cover, but instead, found a sort of Lifetime movie type of tale that, unlike the meals that Ava cooked for her handymen, left me deeply unsatisfied.

As a reviewer, I feel honesty is the best policy when looking at what worked for me, and what did not-it remains solely the opinion of one person, no more and no less.

I am so sorry that I did not enjoy it and found it frustrating, however, I think it would appeal to many other readers-just sadly not this one. My apologies to the publisher, author and blogtour organiser for not liking this novel more.

About the author…

Internationally bestselling author Tess Gerritsen took an unusual route to a writing career. A graduate of Stanford University, Tess went on to medical school at the University of California, San Francisco, where she was awarded her M.D.

While on maternity leave from her work as a physician, she began to write fiction. In 1987, her first novel was published. Call After Midnight, a romantic thriller, was followed by eight more romantic suspense novels. She also wrote a screenplay, “Adrift”, which aired as a 1993 CBS Movie of the Week starring Kate Jackson.

Tess’s first medical thriller, Harvest, was released in hardcover in 1996, and it marked her debut on the New York Times bestseller list. Her suspense novels since then have been: Life Support (1997), Bloodstream (1998), Gravity (1999), The Surgeon (2001), The Apprentice (2002), The Sinner (2003), Body Double (2004), Vanish (2005), The Mephisto Club (2006), The Bone Garden (2007), The Keepsake (2008; UK title: Keeping the Dead), Ice Cold (2010; UK title: The Killing Place), The Silent Girl (2011), Last To Die (2012), Die Again (2014), Playing With Fire (2015), and I Know A Secret (2017). Her books have been published in forty countries, and more than 30 million copies have been sold around the world.

Her books have been top-3 bestsellers in the United States and number one bestsellers abroad. She has won both the Nero Wolfe Award (for Vanish) and the Rita Award (for The Surgeon). Critics around the world have praised her novels as “Pulse-pounding fun” (Philadelphia Inquirer), “Scary and brilliant” (Toronto Globe and Mail), and “Polished, riveting prose” (Chicago Tribune). Publisher Weekly has dubbed her the “medical suspense queen”.

Her series of novels featuring homicide detective Jane Rizzoli and medical examiner Maura Isles inspired the TNT television series “Rizzoli & Isles” starring Angie Harmon and Sasha Alexander.

Now retired from medicine, she writes full time. She lives in Maine.

Links-http://www.tessgerritsen.com/

Twitter @TransworldBooks

@annecater