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THE MEPHISTO CLUB
BY TESS GERRITSEN
Review by Diana Bane
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In THE MEPHISTO CLUB, Tess Gerritsen’s new book featuring
Dr. Maura Isles and Detective Jane Rizzoli, the author takes
us where few have dared to go: to a consideration of the origin
of the evil behind the crimes themselves.
The crimes, as usual with these two ongoing characters, are
horrific enough. On a snowy night just before Christmas, Boston
medical examiner Isles is called to the scene of a murder that
has sickened even the most hardened cops. A woman has been
slashed to pieces, dismembered, the walls not only covered
with her blood but also with symbols that appear to have religious
significance, and the Latin word peccavi, which means I have
sinned. The perpetrator hasn’t stopped there, either:
He or she has drawn a circle in what appears, on closer examination,
to be red chalk … and placed the woman’s head in
the center. A new female homicide detective is unable to take
her first exposure to this sort of carnage and throws up outside
in the snow, setting herself up for some serious hazing by
other members of the team. Already on the scene when Isles
arrives, Rizzoli has learned that someone, most likely the
killer, made a phone call from the residence at about the time
of death. The number called was that of Dr. Joyce O’Donnell,
a forensic psychiatrist and Maura’s nemesis from an earlier
book.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic in Italy, a young woman named
Lily is running for her life, pursued by someone or something
that has so frightened her that she left her home in the United
States and has never allowed herself to live in one place for
more than a few months ever since. Lily is immediately an interesting,
strong character that we want to know more about.
When Dr. Isles autopsies the body, she discovers that the severed
hand found at a distance from the body does not belong to the
woman; that woman’s hand is missing. Her missing hand
turns up a few nights later at another murder: the rookie female
homicide detective, working alone to redeem herself and presumably
following the murderer, has been knifed in the heart with deadly
accuracy outside a residence on Beacon Hill. More cryptic symbols
have been written in red chalk on the house’s door. It
is the residence of Anthony Sansone, a wealthy man and a doctor
of the Ph.D. sort; he has guests for dinner at the time of
the crime, among them Dr. Joyce O’Donnell. In the course
of the investigation, Sansone reveals that his guests were
all members of the Mephisto Foundation, a group that has existed
for centuries. He invites Maura to join: "We share a belief
that evil isn’t just a concept. It’s real, and
it has a physical presence. It has a face. … At some
time in our lives we’ve each seen it in the flesh." While
the symbols left at the crime scenes are not precisely Satanic,
nor does the Mephisto Foundation confine their concerns to
anything as unsophisticated as Satanic cults, it’s all
too religiously oriented for disillusioned Maura and she declines.
But she is intrigued. Jane Rizzoli, the skeptic and practical
crime-fighter, doesn’t care about evil in the abstract
or over the course of history, she just wants to catch the
killer and put him away so he can‘t do it again, and
she wishes the Mephisto Foundation would get out of the way
of her investigation. But they don't; Sansone has high connections.
The plot is rich and complex, proceeding as it does on more
than one level to follow Lily in Italy as well as Isles and
Rizzoli here. The investigation moves from Boston to rural
upper New York state when that hand of unknown origin is identified.
Maura Isles is personally threatened by symbols and the word
peccavi on her own door, after she and her good friend Father
Daniel Brophy spend a night alone in her house. A member of
the Mephisto Foundation is killed in a manner as horrible as
the first, and it becomes apparent that this killer intends
to get them all, including Lily -- who is found by Mephisto
when the police could not locate her. All the threads of the
plot come together with Lily’s return to the house in
rural New York, where Isles and Rizzoli and the others gather
overnight to wait out a fierce snowstorm.
The denouement seems in no way inevitable; I was kept guessing
until the very end. The Mephisto Club is a rewarding read,
especially as it is enriched by the deeper dimension brought
by the Mephisto Foundation’s mission. There is a hint
that we may see more of Anthony Sansone and Lily in the future,
and I hope that will be the case. The Afterward by Tess Gerritsen,
in which she mentions her undergraduate background in anthropology,
is particularly interesting.
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