I decided to read this book purely because I saw an episode of Rizzoli and Isles and I wanted to know how much the television version of these characters strayed from the written versions.

My very short review of this book is that it is far better than the television show based on it and I am definitely going to read at least one more Gerritsen before deciding what I think of her as a writer.

Episodic television shows and thrillers differ in ways far beyond the superficial. Rizzoli and Isles is a lightly plotted (as in you had better duck or you might get hit by the trucks driving through those plot holes) buddy show. The big twist is that the buddies are both women. Imagine Bones if you had Bones as a medical examiner and Booth as a woman. When you only have 42 minutes in which to tell a story you tend to make the story fairly straightforward. Thrillers, especially ones written and published in the era of the doorstop sized book, can take their time, fill in back story, let the reader go away and think about things for a while. Television shows cannot afford to do any of those things. There is more need on television shows to trot out all your characters at least once a show while the written form encourages the exploration of what characters are thinking and feeling even if it doesn't really advance the plot.

To move from the general to the specific. Some parts of The Keepsake seems to be included not because they advance the story but because they advance larger arc stories that run from book to book. For example, the several chapters that focus on Isles personal life may seem irrelevant to someone new to the series and as does the times spent on the deterioration of Frost's marriage and Rizzoli's concerns in dealing with the dissolution of her own parents marriage. Because I choose to read this book after seeing the television show this concentration on what seems to be a superfluous character is less jarring than if I had randomly picked up the book because of the cover blurb -- just as they would not be jarring to readers who had read previous books in the series. The reader who picks up this book at random will find many textual clues that indicate that it is part, though not the first, of a series.

As for the story itself it is definitely a page turner. I read it in basically one gulp. I disliked the focus on torturing women and hope that is not a constant theme in Gerritsen's work. Some of the police procedural details seem lightly sketched in and, as is often the case in books such as this, it isn't so much that the detectives do great work it is more a matter that criminals escalate their behaviour and/or kill off suspects to the point where "whodunnit" is fairly obvious.