A Review of Tess Gerritsen’s The Shape of Night (Ballantine Books, 2019).

Posted by: lesliejfernandez

A Review of Tess Gerritsen’s The Shape of Night (Ballantine Books, 2019).
By Stephen Hong Sohn

Ah, well, it is Fifty Shades of Grey meets The Haunting in Tess Gerritsen’s latest offering, The Shape of Night (Ballantine Books, 2019). I haven’t read something more on the romance side of things for a while, and I was actually caught a little bit off guard because of Gerritsen’s Rizzoli & Isle series, which has been pretty much standard procedural type, detective fiction. In any case, let’s let the official page do some work for us: “After an unspeakable tragedy in Boston, Ava Collette flees to a remote village in Maine, where she rents an old house named Brodie’s Watch. In that isolated seaside mansion, Ava finally feels at peace . . . until she glimpses the long-dead sea captain who still resides there. Rumor has it that Captain Jeremiah Brodie has haunted the house for more than a century. One night, Ava confronts the apparition, who feels all too real, and who welcomes her into his world—and into his arms. Even as Ava questions her own sanity, she eagerly looks forward to the captain’s ghostly visits. But she soon learns that the house she loves comes with a terrible secret, a secret that those in the village don’t want to reveal: Every woman who has ever lived in Brodie’s Watch has also died there. Is the ghost of Captain Brodie responsible, or is a flesh-and-blood killer at work? A killer who is even now circling closer to Ava?”

So, the unspeakable tragedy in Boston is eventually revealed at the novel’s conclusion but you can sort of guess what happened there. In any case, that tragedy is precisely the reason that she “flees” to Maine. She’s working on a book there, one focused on recipes of the seafaring communities in the local area. Ava’s got some problems: she clearly drinks too much, seems a little bit paranoid, and is definitely not confronting problems of her past. You add this kind of character in a location that’s purportedly filled with ghosts and you have the perfect powder keg for bad things. For Ava, the ghostly visitations by Captain Brodie initially seem kind of romantic, with a spark of something forbidden, but things quickly escalate to a level of harm that Ava was not prepared for. Gerritsen is plotting masterfully here precisely because we need to understand the psychological issues related to the tragedy in Boston, which leaves Ava feeling as though she must be punished, even as she also simultaneously craves human compassion and love.

Other wrinkles are thrown into the equation when a dead body washes up on the local shore. Eventually, Ava discovers that the dead body is none other than the former renter of the house, a woman named Charlotte, who seems to have some similarities to her. In fact, as Ava researches the history of the house, she discovers that all of the former people who lived in the house, eventually died there. Will Ava be next? Is the ghost of Captain Brodie a friend or foe? As a romance-thriller, you can’t beat this one on the level of readability. You want to know what the deal is with Captain Brodie. Is he a red herring for some psychic break? If Captain Brodie is not actually the one with supernatural powers, then who killed Charlotte? Could it be one of the workers who is helping to restore Brodie’s Watch, the older gentleman named Ned, who seems to have a complicated history? Or might it be the friendly doctor that has eyes for Ava? In any case, MOST of the answers are solved by the story’s end, but Gerritsen does leave some threads unclosed, leaving some aspects of the mystery to remain a mystery.

Buy the Book Here:

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Leslie J. Fernandez

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don’t hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Leslie J. Fernandez, PhD Student in English, at lfern010@ucr.edu

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