Tess Gerritsen, Ice Cold

Ice Cold is the latest installment in Tess Gerritsen's series featuring medical examiner Maura Isles and homicide detective Jane Rizzoli. This time out, Maura is off to a medical conference in Wyoming. An impulsive change of plan has her taking a road trip with an old acquaintance and his friends, but a series of unfortunate circumstances puts their lives in danger—a snow storm, a wrong turn. Their SUV gets stuck in a ditch in the middle of nowhere, and the only shelter around is a ghost town, Kingdom Come, whose inhabitants apparently fled in the middle of eating dinner. Things get worse from there. It takes very little for their jaunt to turn into a nightmare, only a few moments to make a happy-go-lucky character beg his friends to kill him: one's life really can turn on a dime.

The first half of Ice Cold, before its various mysteries begin to be resolved, is a scary, gripping read, and I had a hard time putting the book down (and turning off the lights) in the midst of it. When the answers start coming the book continues to surprise: what happened at Kingdom Come isn't what we might expect.

Once again after finishing one of Tess Gerritsen's novels I find myself wondering why I haven't read all of the books in her Rizzoli and Isles series by now, start to finish. But this time I did something about it: immediately after finishing Ice Cold I downloaded the first book in the series, The Surgeon, to my Kindle.