Sister murder

Sister murder (English: Body Double ) is a 2004 novel from the Medical Thriller genre by the US writer Tess Gerritsen .

Sister murder is part of the Jane Rizzoli series, in which the Boston homicide detective of the same name has to solve a crime that is hard to beat in terms of atrocity. Tess Gerritsen, herself a mother of two sons, deals in detail with the subject of pregnancy, which is of central importance for the plot, in Sister Murder.

action

The coroner Dr. On returning from a business trip, Maura Isles is confronted with the shocking fact that an almost perfect doppelganger was shot in front of her apartment. Was the assassination aimed at herself? Isles, who grew up with adoptive parents from a very early age, begins to explore her own past. The suspicion that the murdered woman is her twin sister is growing.

Out of curiosity, Maura Isles visits the remote home of her deceased sister. During excavation work, skeletonized corpses are found in the immediate vicinity. A coffin-like box with a ventilation pipe is being excavated in the cellar of the house. The Boston homicide squad, led by heavily pregnant Jane Rizzoli, steps in. Initial investigations reveal that Isles' birth mother had lived in this house 45 years earlier. She has been serving a life sentence for a brutal double homicide for four years.

By evaluating unexplained deaths, the officials are working out a frightening pattern from the statistical data: For over 40 years, heavily pregnant women have been disappearing month after month across North America. The only possible perpetrators are Isle's parents, who have been roaming the country restlessly and restlessly for decades. They kidnapped women who were about to give birth and locked them in an underground box until they were born. They financed their livelihood by selling the children to couples willing to adopt; the mothers were murdered and buried.

Since Isle's mother is in prison, the police's search is focused on the father, who began his criminal career as a teenager by burying a living cat and then trapping a classmate in a hole in the ground. It turns out that the father has been dead for years, but his place has been taken by his son. But the series of murders continues to the present day.

literature

Tess Gerritsen: Sister murder . Blanvalet, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-442-36615-6 (Original title: Body Double . Translated by Andreas Jäger).