Dead Ground (novel)
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Totengrund (English. Ice Cold ) is a novel from the Medical Thriller genre by the US writer Tess Gerritsen , published in German on November 6, 2010 .
Totengrund is the eighth book in the Jane Rizzoli series about the Boston detective Jane Rizzoli and the coroner Dr. Maura Isles.
action
The coroner Dr. Maura Isles meets an old friend at a medical congress in Wyoming and decides to take him, his underage daughter and their couple of friends on a trip to a mountain hut. However, you stay on a snow-covered country road and have to escape to an abandoned village. Strangely enough, the village seems frozen in time - the food is still on the tables, pets are lying around dead. The group tries to get out of the village as quickly as possible, but one of them sustains a serious leg injury while trying. Maura's friend goes to get help, but meanwhile the patient's condition deteriorates rapidly. Maura also discovers various tracks in the snow that scare her and show that she is not alone in the village. When she sees no other option than to amputate the sick man's leg and the other two remaining women refuse to help her, she also leaves the village to get help and to look for her friend, who is already helping the way back should have been. On the way she hears an approaching vehicle, whereupon she happily awaits the speedy rescue. Shortly before they met, however, she met a pursuer who had sneaked up.
Jane Rizzoli is now in Wyoming, at the urging of Father Daniel Brophy, Maura's lover, whose messages to Maura went unanswered and who is very worried about her. Rizzoli and her husband, FBI agent Gabriel Dean, haven't found anything suspicious yet. But then she got word of a wrecked car in which Maura's luggage and a charred corpse her age were found. Assuming the dead person is Maura, the body is transferred to Boston and released for burial. Only at the funeral does Rizzoli receive a call, which lets them order a more detailed examination of the body. The dental analysis shows that it is not Dr. Isles acts.
She was kidnapped by a 16-year-old boy named Julian Perkins, aka Rat, who claims he did this for her safety. She soon believes him when she later sees the deserted, burned-down village. Desperately looking for her friend, Rizzoli gives the local police items from Maura for the detection dogs, which a short time later are used against Maura in connection with a police murder. With Julian's help, she gets to a phone and calls Rizzoli. Rat tries to convince her to flee and not trust anyone, but she waits and is captured by a police officer. Rat stops him and accidentally kills the deputy in battle. Maura and Julian flee together when they are shot at.
An armed search party pursues the alleged police murderers, who are also Dean and Anthony Sansone, a wealthy friend of Maura's who considers himself a demon hunter and is a leading member of the Mephisto Club. Rizzoli is investigating together with the district social worker, Cathy Weiss, against an ominous sect that calls itself "The Gathering" and was based in the village. They find out that the dead deputy had been bribed and keep searching feverishly for answers. In the abandoned village they come across a mass grave with finally 41 dead who were buried under the snow. Maura and Rat flee from the search party, but they confront them and a loner, the owner of a large farm, who wants to kill Maura and the boy. Rat is shot by the man and only survives because Agent Dean and Sansone stop the farm owner and Maura puts a life-saving chest tube on the boy .
Rat survives and ends up in intensive care. Maura is present at the autopsy of the first victim, an underage girl, from the mass grave. She suspects a mass suicide by potassium cyanide (cyankali), which is typical for some sects . Therefore, the young girl's body is dissected with a respirator. Since a gas sensor rules out exposure to hydrogen cyanide , the senior forensic doctor takes off the mask. Shortly thereafter, he faints and then has to be reanimated. Only Maura apparently combined correctly and suspected phosphoric acid ester poisoning. On her advice, the emergency team gives the unconscious atropine IV, which saves his life. A short time later, a raid is started to catch the leader of the sect, a self-proclaimed prophet named Jeremiah Goode, in another settlement in Idaho. The police are already waiting for the police there, which makes Rizzoli and Weiss suspicious. It turns out that Goode had the confrontation with the officers filmed in order to later portray himself as a victim. Cathy Weiss identifies herself as Katie Sheldon, who was forcibly married to Goode 16 years ago, who was abused several times by him and who gave birth to at least six children. Katie shoots Goode before being shot by the police herself. The sect then breaks apart, as Sheldon had suspected in advance, without its leader.
Dr. Isles and Rizzoli are about to go home when they learn that the victims were not killed by a phosphoric acid ester from a pesticide . Maura realizes her misjudgment and goes back to the village. There she finds containers with VX gas , a chemical warfare agent that works in the same way as the pesticide. The farm owner followed them and threatened to destroy the container, which would kill him and the two women from the nerve gas released. Rizzoli is forced to shoot him. The village was wiped out not by mass murder but by an accident during the uncovering of poison gas containers illegally buried by the farm owner.
Months later, it is learned that Maura's request to adopt Rat was rejected due to her living conditions. Instead, the boy is admitted to a special private school by Sansone and Lily Saul, an antiquarian from Blutmarks who is also a demon hunter from the Mephisto Club, in order to use and perfect his special survival skills.
literature
- Tess Gerritsen: Dead Ground . Limes, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-8090-2576-4 (Original title: Ice Cold . Translated by Andreas Jäger).